If you weren’t scared of the ocean already, you probably will be after seeing this...
A ‘death pool’ has been discovered at the bottom of the Red Sea that instantly kills everything that swims inside it.
The pool was found by University of Miami researchers and measures a whopping 107,00 square feet.
It’s a long way down, having been discovered 1.1 miles beneath the surface of the inlet of the Indian Ocean found between Africa and Asia.
It has been there for an awfully long time, too. The pools are thought to have been formed from pockets of minerals which were deposited up to 23 million years ago.
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The reason it’s so deadly? It contains no oxygen. Instead, it’s filled with brine and the salt solution is deadly to most things that enter it.
Researcher Sam Purkis told Live Science: “Any animal that strays into the brine is immediately stunned or killed.”
He also said that the pool is “among the most extreme environments on Earth.”
It’s used by some creatures for food, with Purkis saying that: “Fish, shrimp and eels appear to use the brine to hunt.”
Predators position themselves on the peripheries of the pool in order to “feed on the unlucky” creatures that die after swimming into it.
While it’s not the first brine-filled pool under the sea discovered by scientists in the Red Sea, it is the closest to land.
It can be found just 1.25miles off the coast of Egypt, while the previous closest pool was more than 15 miles away from land.
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