The Most Inhospitable Places on Earth

摘要

As the remotely operated vehicle Jason approached the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, its cameras relayed an eerie scene back to the research vessel Atlantis. It looked like a dark lake on the seafloor. A narrow white stripe meandered across the brown seafloor like a beachfront; beyond it lay an impenetrable blackness. When the vehicle nosed closer, the water around it shimmered like waves of heat above a summer road, and cloudy wisps streaked the view ahead. Jason was giving scientists their first clear look at a Deep Hypersaline Anoxic Basin, or DHAB. These depressions on the seafloor-utterly dark and under pressure up to 350 times higher than on land-are filled with water that is totally lacking oxygen and up to ten times saltier than normal seawater. They would seem to be more hostile to life than anywhere else on Earth.