Context

• Extremophile microbes can adapt to environmental conditions that are too extreme for everything else.
• New research, however, has pointed to a place on Earth — bubbling pools of water and mounds of salt covering its landscape — that is too daunting even for these microorganisms.

About the depression:

• The Danakil Depression in northeastern Ethiopia is one of the world’s hottest places, as well as one of its lowest, at 100 metres below sea level.
• At the northern end of the Great Rift Valley, and separated by live volcanoes from the Red Sea, the plain was formed by the evaporation of an inland water body.
• All the water entering Danakil evaporates, and no streams flow out from its extreme environment. It is covered with more than 10 lakh tonnes of salt.

Source: IE