The salt water lake at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is so toxic that it kills and mummifies almost all animals unfortunate enough to swim in.
An extremely salty lake of death at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is also known as the “bath of despair”. Conditions in the lake are so toxic that only bacteria and a few animals can survive. Researchers discovered the “Bath of Despair” during a 2015 expedition to study cold vents in the deep waters of the bay. Cold vents are where hydrocarbons, key components of oil and gas, escape from the seafloor and enter the water column. In the Gulf of Mexico, hydrocarbons are spewed by shifting salt plates in the Earth’s crust, formed when water evaporated from an ancient sea millions of years ago, according to Live Science.
The expedition nicknamed this particular cold vent the “Bath of Despair” after they discovered crabs and other creatures dead inside the basin-shaped lake. The blowhole is located at a depth of nearly 1,000 m below the sea surface, has a circumference of 30.5 m and a depth of 3.7 m.
The brine inside the lake results from hydrocarbons bubbling up through buried salt slabs, according to expedition results published in 2016 in the journal Oceanography. This brine is four times saltier and much denser than the seawater around the cold vent, preventing the two types of water from mixing. The temperature inside the lake reaches 19 degrees Celsius, combined with high salinity, creating deadly conditions for most biological organizations. Salt water also contains high concentrations of hydrogen sulfide and methane, so only some organisms such as mussels can tolerate it.
The lake is surrounded by steep walls, containing many streams of red, yellow and white minerals as well as oyster beds. According to a researcher on the expedition, the mussels did a good job of keeping the lake walls intact. Inside the lake there are mummies of many unfortunate creatures that crawled into it.