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Richard Harris -
Scientists have been diving in the Gulf of Mexico on a miniature submarine to see how the ecosystems there are coping with the BP oil spill. The expedition gradually edged toward ground zero — the BP wellhead.
Looking for robust sea life in the Gulf isn't as odd as it may seem. From the coast of Louisiana, the Gulf of Mexico may seem like a muddy sea sacrificed to the thirst for oil and gas. But that's not the case when you get far offshore. The waters there turn crystal clear. And, in places, marine life thrives on the seafloor.
In November, the three-person Alvin dived almost every day from the stern of the research vessel Atlantis, which sails from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Each day, as the Alvin came back onboard, scientists huddled around its collection basket to see the day's haul. On one dive Thanksgiving week, the Alvin returned with plexiglass cylinders filled with mud from the bottom, strange, red rock samples, and seawater in special pressure vessels.
Dives To An Underwater Lake
Andreas Teske, a professor of marine sciences at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, looks appreciatively at the day's treasure and declares that it is one of the best dives of the entire expedition.
He describes a habitat you would never expect to find nearly a mile under the sea: mussel beds, orange and white bacterial carpets that spread across the seafloor, along with the more predictable fish, shrimp and sea cucumbers. Strikingly, they were all arrayed around an underwater lake — a lake on the seafloor made up of supersalty water called brine.
"You could see the surface of the brine pool just like the surface of a garden pond, totally clear," Teske says. "And in the brine pond, some animals that fell in [got] pickled — some crabs and others. So once they fall in, if they don't manage to climb out quickly, that's it!"
As a result, scientists dubbed this spot Dead Crab Lake.
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