Do “Seas Within the Sea” Like in SpongeBob Really Exist? 《海綿寶寶》中的 「海中之海」 From Cartoon to Reality: The Mystery of Underwater Lakes In the cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants, characters surf, sunbathe, and hang out at Goo Lagoon – a beach where the “goo” looks and acts like a separate body of water inside the ocean [1]. But wait – If they are all sea creatures which already live underwater, then why is there another pool? Isn’t the whole ocean already water? This seems like pure cartoon nonsense…until you learn that “seas within the sea” actually exist on the ocean floor! These strange underwater lakes are called deep-sea brine pools. They’re not made of cartoon goo, but of extremely salty water. Because of this density difference, the brine doesn’t mix with the ocean above [2–4]. Instead, it sits on the seafloor like a lake, with a visible surface you can even “float” a robot submarine on [5]. Just like in the cartoon, animals that wander too deep into the brine can die – because inside, there’s almost no oxygen, and the water often contains high levels of hydrogen sulfide and methane, causing immediate suffocation and toxic shock for animals that enter it [2, 5, 6]. How Were Brine Pools Discovered? One of the brine pool systems most frequently studied – the NEOM Brine Pools – was discovered in a 2020 expedition in the Gulf of Aqaba, between Saudi Arabia and Egypt [4, 5]. Located 1,770 meters below the surface, this site includes one large pool about the size of two football fields, and three tiny ones nearby [5]. The discovery of brine pools was made using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) – basically an underwater robot with cameras. What they saw looked like something from another planet: a still, dark “lake” with an orange-to-gray rim, surrounded by shrimp and eels cautiously dipping in to grab stunned prey [4, 5]. How Do They Form? Brine pools aren’t filled by salt dumped from the sky. Instead, they form when ancient salt layers, buried under the seafloor for millions of years, dissolve into seawater that seeps down through cracks in the ocean crust [5, 6]. These massive salt deposits are leftovers from a time when the water body was partially cut off from the ocean and
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