Ring 4 of Eleven · The Natural Time Warp Wheel
Two layers of water, never mixing, both entirely real.
The Black Sea is the world's largest meromictic basin, its deep water permanently anoxic and sulphidic below roughly 150 metres — a genuinely unusual body of water among the twelve candidates gathered in this Book. The source annotation carries its own explicit question mark, preserved rather than resolved.
Above roughly a hundred and fifty metres the water breathes oxygen the way any sea does; below that line it has not mixed with the surface in thousands of years. Two conditions occupying the same place without merging is not a contradiction in a body of water — someone can hold an ordinary surface life directly above a much older, unmixed layer of their own experience, and both can be entirely real at once.
This Area is one of the Twelve registered in Book II, The Natural Time Warp Areas. See The Natural Time Warp Wheel for the full identification table.
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