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The earthly concern ’s saltiest body of water , enshroud away in a dry Antarctic valley , had its portrait ask earlier this year by aNASAsatellite .
The image of theDon Juan Pond , a very shallow lake located in the low part of Antarctica ’s Upper Wright Valley , that NASA released today ( Dec. 29 ) was taken by the agency ’s Earth Observing-1 satellite .
Antarctica’s Don Juan Pond is the saltiest body of water on the planet.
With a salt higher than 40 pct , the south-polar pool is even salty than the Middle East’sDead Sea(34 percent ) and Utah’sGreat Salt Lake(whose salinity varies between 5 and 27 percentage ) . For compare , the average salinity of the world ’s ocean is about 3.5 percent . [ The Most Mars - corresponding Places on Earth ]
Scientists do n’t know whether the supersalty lakesupports microscopical life . If it does , that could suggest that life sentence exist or existed in the past times on Mars , which contain plenty of salt and used to havelots of water supply .
" There is for sure biological science in the neighbourhood of the pond , and some grounds for biological activity in the pool itself , but this action could be explain by [ nonliving ] process , " Brown University geologist Jay Dickson severalize NASA .
NASA Earth-Observing Satellite photo showing Don Juan Pond, a network of channels carved into the bedrock east of the Wright Upper Glacier, and the frozen Lake Vanda to the northeast of the pond.
The pond is in the McMurdo Dry Valleys , where winter temperatures can cast to as low as minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit ( minus 50 point Celsius ) , and most of the pool and lake are covered by quite a few feet of ice .
But the ankle - deep Don Juan Pond is so piquant that it never freeze down . The body of water is robust in the table salt calcium chloride , which interferes with theformation of iceby preventing the water molecules from forming crystal .
In the above mental image , the pool is an ellipse that lies at the bottom of a washbasin , between the Dais tableland to the north and the Asgard Range to the south . The lake is slightly darker than the larger lake - bottom area palisade it .
The simulacrum to the right shows a wider horizon of Don Juan Pond , depicting a net of channel carved into the fundamental principle east of the Wright Upper Glacier , and the frozen Lake Vanda to the northeast of the pond . The images were captured on Jan. 3 , 2014 .
It was long thought that Don Juan Pond was fed by pee bubbling up from the primer coat , but recent research suggests that the lake ’s piddle comes from the air .
In one study , Dickson and James Head , also a geologist at Brown University , determine up photographic camera that took thousand of time - lapse photos of the lake . The table salt in the soil near the pond bring wet from the gentle wind into the soil through a unconscious process known as deliquescence . Then , the salt - rich weewee flows down toward the pond , often commingle with melt Charles Percy Snow and ice , which create dark-skinned water tracks on the soil , the investigator said .
