Real 'Hot Tub of Despair'? This oceanic region supposedly kills anything that enters

As the rumor goes, an oceanic area off the eastern coast of Mexico is a "Jacuzzi of Despair," a pool of oceanic water that kills anything that enters it.

A January 2025 Reddit post (archive) makes the claim, displaying an image of a deep-sea brine pool, a toxic body of heavy water and chemicals that rests along the seafloor.

Deep in the Gulf of Mexico lies the 'Jacuzzi of Despair,' a deadly brine pool that kills anything that enters its waters.
byu/CrypticLyfe inDragonsDogma

Posts across social media platforms including Instagram and Facebook have made the same assertion. 

The claim was mostly true. Marine scientists indeed call a deep-sea brine pool in the Gulf of Mexico (or Gulf of America, per U.S. President Donald Trump) a "Jacuzzi of Despair," or "Hot Tub of Despair." However, while it's true that most organisms that enter the water will die due to its toxic effects, some chemosynthetic organisms — organisms that create energy through chemicals in the pool — may survive. 

Researchers discovered the brine pool in 2015 while exploring deep ocean waters off the southern U.S. Publications like the Los Angeles Times, Live Science, and Discovery have reported on the toxic body of water since its discovery.

In essence, brine pools are underwater lakes on the ocean floor, formed by dense, salty brine that does not mix with seawater above, according to Ocean Exploration Trust (OET), a nonprofit organization that explores the ocean for scientific discoveries. In addition to the in-question body of water in the Gulf of Mexico, other deep-sea, brine pools are located around the world, including the Red Sea, an area that holds a Guinness World Record for its high concentration of pools. 

Brine pools are built of mineral deposits that separate its toxic waters from surrounding ocean water. Because the two have different consistencies, the pool explored by OET appears to have a shoreline along the seafloor.

OET says on its website (emphasis ours):

Deep on the ocean's floor, there exist lakes of salty brine, formed from salt seeping out from deposits underlying the seafloor, saturating pools to such an extent that they refuse to mix with the surrounding water. The salinity of these pools is so great that they are toxic to most sea life, but certain highly adapted chemosynthetic organisms have found ways to survive and even thrive on the shores of these undersea lakes.

At the time of the in-question pool's discovery in 2015, OET published videos and photos of what it called the "Brine Pool: Hot Tub of Despair." OET captured the media during an underwater trip to "better understand how [brine pools] form, how they may change over time, and how the organisms living near them are able to survive and even thrive."

OET operates a 223-foot research ship, Exploration Vessel Nautilus. The research initiative was ongoing, as of this writing, and involved remote-operated vehicles (ROVs) that project leaders use on the seafloor — sometimes thousands of feet below the surface — to record and collect samples.

Researchers captured footage of the in-question brine pool during two cruises to find what they call "cold seeps" — locations along the seafloor "where hydrocarbons that are normally trapped deep beneath the seafloor escape into the water column." Cold seeps can provide homes to toxic waters like brine pools, as OET described on its website (emphasis ours):

At some seep sites, seawater interacts with ancient salt deposits found deep in the seafloor, producing a highly saline fluid (brine) that can be more than four times more saline than seawater. When this brine is expelled, it is far denser than the overlying seawater and does not mix very easily with it. In some cases, the brine forms large pools, rivers or lakes.

This highly saline environment is toxic for most organisms, but we did encounter beds of mussels and fields of tube worms that have adapted to life in this extreme habitat by processing seep gases and chemicals into energy. A larger brine pool was dubbed the "Hot Tub of Despair," referring to its warm temperature (19°C) and high salt content—which can be fatal to many animals unlucky enough to fall in. This site was found nearly 3,300 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and is a circular pool 100 feet in circumference and 12 feet deep.

In other words, while the waters are "fatal to many animals," scientists have documented chemosynthetic microbes including mussels and tube worms living near or in the brine pool. 

OET wrote on its YouTube channel: "On one hand, [brine pools] provide the basis for life through chemosynthesis for creatures living near them on the bottom of the ocean. On the other hand, the fluid they contain is extremely toxic to many forms of sea life." As of this publication, a YouTube video of the in-question brine pool has received more than 6 million views.

After the expedition, OET published an album of photos showing organisms that live in the so-called "Hot Tub of Despair." The images depicted deep-sea organisms such as mussels that thrive in symbiosis with chemosynthetic bacteria that get energy via chemicals released by the brine pool.

(OET)

As OET noted, some organisms that enter the brine pool "rarely come back out."

(OET)

(OET)

Scientists described more details about the brine pool in the March 2016 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Oceanography.