I'm not really seeing what's so clickbait about the title? They discovered something very surprising in the area. The area has an incredible amount of sulfates but I don't think anyone actually expected to find elemental sulfur in a natural environment, i.e. native sulfur formations.
If anything the article actually understates how wild it is to not only find this but that many of the surrounding rocks also show the same.
This region is believed to have been formed predominantly by erosion from flows of water or landslides. Native sulfur really only comes from 3 things:
3. Reduction of sulfates into sulfides by bacteria under specific conditions that result in the production of elemental sulfur as a byproduct.
Given that none of these 3 were expected from this area, that leaves a pretty substantial question of how it got there, how it was produced, and if it wasn't produced locally, where it came from.
So again I'm not really sure if it was clickbait by any means.
It's clickbait in what I believe is the original sense -- the title could easily state what specific thing it is talking about (sulfur), but instead it uses a vaguer term ("a surprise") so that you have to click on it to learn what the story is.
Calling it "clickbait" here doesn't mean it's a worthless article. It just means that the title is vague in an obviously needless way.
If anything the article actually understates how wild it is to not only find this but that many of the surrounding rocks also show the same.
This region is believed to have been formed predominantly by erosion from flows of water or landslides. Native sulfur really only comes from 3 things:
1. Geothermal environments (ex: volcanos)
2. Hydrothermal environments (ex: hotsprings, geysers, etc).
3. Reduction of sulfates into sulfides by bacteria under specific conditions that result in the production of elemental sulfur as a byproduct.
Given that none of these 3 were expected from this area, that leaves a pretty substantial question of how it got there, how it was produced, and if it wasn't produced locally, where it came from.
So again I'm not really sure if it was clickbait by any means.