The saltiest water on Earth is found in Lake Don Juan in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica. A shallow lake, it is more like a pond just a few inches deep. Its water is so salty that it rarely freezes even in temperature as low as -50 degrees Celsius.
The lake which has a salinity level of over 40 per cent is saltier than the Dead Sea.
With a salinity higher than 40 percent, the Antarctic pond is even saltier than the Middle East’s Dead Sea (34 percent) and Utah’s Great Salt Lake (whose salinity varies between 5 and 27 percent). For comparison, the average salinity of the world’s ocean is about 3.5 percent.
Scientists don’t know whether the supersalty lake supports microscopic life. If it does, that could suggest that life exists or existed in the past on Mars, which contains plenty of salt and used to have lots of water.
The pond is in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, where winter temperatures can drop to as low as minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 50 degrees Celsius), and most of the ponds and lakes are covered by quite a few feet of ice.
But the ankle-deep Don Juan Pond is so salty that it never freezes. The water is rich in the salt calcium chloride, which interferes with the formation of ice by preventing the water molecules from forming crystals.
Credit : Live Science
Picture Credit : Google
