There Is a Lake at the Bottom of the Gulf of Mexico

There is a lake at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. It has a surface. It has islands. It has a shoreline you can trace for the length of a football field. And it is real footage, filmed nearly a mile down by a NOAA robot that was looking for something else entirely. In 1965 a research ship pulled up water so hot the scientist in charge did not believe his own thermometer. What he had found was the first hint of something stranger: brine pools, pockets of ancient seawater so salty and so dense that they sit at the bottom of the ocean like a lake sits inside a landscape, refusing to mix with the sea around them. A submarine can float on the surface of one. Nothing that lives in the ocean can survive inside one. So the shoreline should be empty. It is the busiest strip of real estate on the seafloor, thousands of mussels packed shoulder to shoulder, eating the poison instead of dying from it. This film follows the brine pools from the first accidental discovery in the Red Sea in 1965 to the Gulf of Mexico dives that filmed a lake, an island chain, and a waterfall that should not exist underwater, using real NOAA Ocean Exploration ROV footage of the Gulf of Mexico brine pools. Chapters: 0:00 The Impossible Reading 0:45 Two Kinds of Water 2:26 The Lake 4:12 The Waterfall 5:31 The Archive 6:52 The Border Footage courtesy of NOAA Ocean Exploration (Okeanos Explorer, expeditions EX1402 and EX1803, public domain, US federal work). Additional figures courtesy of Purkis et al. 2022, Communications Earth and Environment (CC BY 4.0). New to Sunless Deep: real footage of the last unexplored place on Earth, no generated video, ever. Subscribe to catch the next one, a mountain range taller than anything on land that nobody has ever climbed.