Abstract
THE hot salty water discovered in the Red Sea during the Discovery expedition1, and which has also been studied during other expeditions2,3, is widely thought to have come from the highly mineralized ground waters emerging at the sea bottom. It is not clear, however, why the rather common phenomenon of emerging ground waters brings about the formation of abnormal water masses only in the Red Sea. Brine supplied from underwater sources is usually immediately mixed with circulating oceanic water. Miller et al.4 refer to a hypothesis by K. O. Emery which, unfortunately, had not been developed in detail. Emery supposed the hot brine to have been concentrated by evaporation of the water masses of the Red Sea when it was cut off from the oceans during glaciation. This possibility has also been mentioned by Degens and Ross5. Miller put forward a number of objections to Emery's hypothesis, but it is my view that these can be overcome by assuming the basins discovered at the bottom of the Red Sea to have been lakes developed according to limnological laws.
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KVASOV, D. Limnological Hypothesis of the Origin of Hot Brines in the Red Sea. Nature 221, 850–851 (1969). https://doi.org/10.1038/221850a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/221850a0
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