Red Sea brine pools hint at how early life got energy

At the bottom of the Red Sea, briny 'death pools' are so salty and oxygen-poor that most organisms cannot survive there. But their chemistry may mirror what the early oceans looked like before oxygen accumulated and before photosynthesis evolved. Both Phys.org and AGU Eos report on the same research, which treats these extreme environments as natural laboratories for studying life's origins.

The key evidence points to the oxidation of manganese and iron as a possible energy engine for the first life forms. In the absence of oxygen, microbes or prebiotic systems could have used these metals to drive metabolism. The two sources agree on this interpretation, with no substantive differences between them.

While the pools themselves are hostile to most life, they preserve chemical signatures that are otherwise lost in younger, more oxidized environments. That makes them a rare window into a time when the Earth's oceans were very different from today.

Neither source claims this proves how life began, only that the Red Sea findings strengthen the case for metal-driven energy metabolism as an early step in life's history. The work adds a concrete geochemical clue to a puzzle that has largely been{