The Dead Sea

Dead & Dying

• All About The Dead Sea

  The Dead Sea (Arabic, Bahr al-Lut; ancient Greco-Romano, Lacus Asphaltites), the lowest surface point on the planet (the actual lowest point is under the ocean), is situated in the 350-mile-long (560 km) Jordan - Dead Sea rift valley, bordered by the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan to its east, the State of Israel to its southwest, and the West Bank to its northwest. The surface of the Dead Sea is 1,302 feet (397 m) below Mediterranean sea level, with an area of about 395 square miles (1,020 sq km). It is 51 miles (82 km) long.

  This inland lake is the world's saltiest; its water contains about 25 percent solid concentrates, as compared to ocean concentrates of some 4 to 6 percent. The lake has no outlet and is fed from the north by waters of the Jordan River and wadis (streams that are usually dry but fill during the rainy season). In its middle, it is divided by the Lisan (tongue), which stretches across some 75 percent of the lake's width from Jordan toward Israel. Economically, the Dead Sea is important to the bordering regions, since each uses it for tourism - many visitors seek its purported medicinal properties and spas exist to allow such visits, especially in Israel. The land near its shores is also cultivated, with sweet irrigation water brought to those fields. From the Dead Sea's brine, both Jordan and Israel extract potash, an important component of agricultural fertilizer.

  The Dead Sea has attracted visitors from around the Mediterranean basin for thousands of years. In the Bible, it is a place of refuge for King David. It was one of the world's first health resorts (for Herod the Great), and it has been the supplier of a wide variety of products, from asphalt for Egyptian mummification to potash for fertilizers. People also use the salt and the minerals from the Dead Sea to create cosmetics and herbal sachets. The Dead Sea water has a density of 1.24 kg/litre, which makes swimming similar to floating.

• All About The Dead Sea

  The Dead Sea (Arabic, Bahr al-Lut; ancient Greco-Romano, Lacus Asphaltites), the lowest surface point on the planet (the actual lowest point is under the ocean), is situated in the 350-mile-long (560 km) Jordan - Dead Sea rift valley, bordered by the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan to its east, the State of Israel to its southwest, and the West Bank to its northwest. The surface of the Dead Sea is 1,302 feet (397 m) below Mediterranean sea level, with an area of about 395 square miles (1,020 sq km). It is 51 miles (82 km) long.

  This inland lake is the world's saltiest; its water contains about 25 percent solid concentrates, as compared to ocean concentrates of some 4 to 6 percent. The lake has no outlet and is fed from the north by waters of the Jordan River and wadis (streams that are usually dry but fill during the rainy season). In its middle, it is divided by the Lisan (tongue), which stretches across some 75 percent of the lake's width from Jordan toward Israel. Economically, the Dead Sea is important to the bordering regions, since each uses it for tourism - many visitors seek its purported medicinal properties and spas exist to allow such visits, especially in Israel. The land near its shores is also cultivated, with sweet irrigation water brought to those fields. From the Dead Sea's brine, both Jordan and Israel extract potash, an important component of agricultural fertilizer.

  The Dead Sea has attracted visitors from around the Mediterranean basin for thousands of years. In the Bible, it is a place of refuge for King David. It was one of the world's first health resorts (for Herod the Great), and it has been the supplier of a wide variety of products, from asphalt for Egyptian mummification to potash for fertilizers. People also use the salt and the minerals from the Dead Sea to create cosmetics and herbal sachets. The Dead Sea water has a density of 1.24 kg/litre, which makes swimming similar to floating.

• Is The Dead Sea Dying?

  Not that much freshwater flows in these days. That's why the sea is dying, or drying up, at the rate of more than 3 vertical feet per year - which on the gradual slope of the western shore can translate into 65 ft. of exposed seabed. Most of the damage has been done in the last half-century, when almost all the water that once reached the Dead Sea was diverted to farms and taps. The Jordan River, so mighty in the Bible, is today a puny creek that draws snarls from disappointed tourists. "Everything changed when we started diverting water from the Sea of Galilee," says Mira Edelstein of Friends of the Earth Middle East. "The Jordan River used to bring 1.3 billion cu. ft. of water a year. Today it's 50 million. That's 2% of what it was."

  At the same time, a unique and thirsty industry has been taking water from the sea, accelerating its decline. At the southern tip of the sea, the sprawling Dead Sea Works leaches huge quantities of the fertilizer potash from the seawater by funneling water through a canal into vast evaporation ponds in what once was the sea's southern basin. The Israeli company puts some of the water back, but combined with a similar operation on the Jordanian side, the result is a net loss for an already shrinking lake. "It's the combined issue of the Jordan River not flowing in anymore and industry drawing out water from the south," Edelstein says. "No wonder the Dead Sea is dying."

  It's a spectacular death. Huge sinkholes are opening up, the earth's crust collapsing as freshwater springs follow receding seashore downhill. When the freshwater encounters massive subterranean boulders made of salt, it dissolves them, leaving the crust to collapse under its own weight, or, say, the weight of the woman who dropped 25 ft. into the first one to open at the Ein Gedi campground in 1998. The same process is killing sumptuous oases. Three gardens fed by springs are drying as the water heads downslope, the plants unable to follow because the former lake bed is lethally saturated with salt. "Huge oases are disappearing," says Ariel Kedem, an instructor at the field school in Ein Gedi, Israel.

  What to do? One especially extravagant option: pipe in water from the Red Sea, 118 miles to the south. The Red-to-Dead canal would cost at least $17 billion and risk throwing the ecology of the Dead Sea wildly out of balance, not least because the Red Sea is a piece of the Indian Ocean, while what's been flowing into the Dead Sea for millennia is freshwater. Still, the plan has a fan in the Kingdom of Jordan, which would build a desalination plant on the canal and thereby supply its capital region with badly needed (and hugely expensive) drinking water.

• 

• • Sinkholes
  • 

  • Magic Waters
  • 

  • Fauna & Flora
  •