Extremophile microbes can adapt to environmental conditions that are too extreme for everything else. New research, however, has pointed that Danakil Depression is an exception as microorganisms cant survive here.
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The Danakil Depression — bubbling pools of water and mounds of salt covering its landscape — in northeastern Ethiopia is one of the world’s hottest places, as well as one of its lowest, at 100 metres below sea level.
At the northern end of the Great Rift Valley, and separated by live volcanoes from the Red Sea, the plain was formed by the evaporation of an inland water body.
All the water entering Danakil evaporates, and no streams flow out from its extreme environment. It is covered with more than 10 lakh tonnes of salt.
Now, a new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, says that active and naturally occurring life cannot be sustained at Danakil. It identifies two barriers: magnesium-dominated brines that cause cells to break down; and an environment having simultaneously very low pH and high salt, a combination that makes adaptation highly difficult.
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