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L'Atalante basin

Anoxic hypersaline brine basin at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea

Summary

Anoxic hypersaline brine basin at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea

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name	L'Atalante basin
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pushpin_map	Mediterranean

| date-built = | date-flooded = | max-depth = L'Atalante basin is a hypersaline brine lake at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea about 192 km west of the island of Crete. It is named for the French L'Atalante, one of the oceanographic research vessels involved in its discovery in 1993. L'Atalante and its neighbors the Urania and Discovery deep hyper saline anoxic basins (DHABs) are at most 35,000 years old. They were formed by Messinian evaporite salt deposits dissolving out of the Mediterranean Ridge and collecting in abyssal depressions about 3000 m deep. L'Atalante is the smallest of the three; its surface begins at about 3500 m below sea level.

Description and biology

The L'Atalante basin's salinity is near saturation at 365 (about 8 times that of ordinary seawater), which prevents it from mixing with the oxygenated waters above; therefore, it is completely anoxic.

The dark gray anoxic sediments at the bottom of L'Atalante lake are covered with a 1 cm loose black layer. Microbes found in the sediments are almost all (90%) various species of Bacillus.

References

(2008). "Diversity of Bacillus-like organisms isolated from deep-sea hyper saline anoxic sediments". BioMed Central.
"L'ATALANTE". Marinetraffic.com.
(2006). "Sediment injection in the pit of the Urania Anoxic brine lake (Eastern Mediterranean)". Springer Milan.
(1996). "Marine geology of the Medriff Corridor, Mediterranean Ridge". The Geological Society of Japan.
(2007). "Primary producing prokaryotic communities of brine, interface and seawater above the halo cline of deep anoxic lake L'Atalante, Eastern Mediterranean Sea". Nature Publishing Group.
(2009). "Microbial eukaryotes in the hypersaline anoxic L'Atalante deep-sea basin". Society for Applied Microbiology.
Fang, Janet. (6 April 2010). "Animals thrive without oxygen at sea bottom". NatureNews.
(April 2010). "The first metazoa living in permanently anoxic conditions". BMC Biology.

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

anoxic-waters oceanic-basins-of-the-atlantic-ocean mediterranean-sea

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