The Dead Sea, bordered by Jordan, Israel and the West Bank, is one of the strangest bodies of water on the planet. Its water is nearly ten times saltier than the ocean, so dense with dissolved minerals that a person cannot sink in it and instead bobs on the surface like a cork. That same water sits at the lowest point on any land surface on Earth, in a deep valley more than 400 meters below sea level.
For all its fame, the lake is shrinking at an alarming pace. Its shoreline retreats a little further each year as the water level drops, exposing dried-out seabed and cracking the land with sinkholes. The forces pulling the Dead Sea down are largely human, tied to how the rivers that once fed it are now used before the water can ever arrive.
Why bathers float so easily
The buoyancy that draws visitors comes down to density. Ordinary seawater contains around 3.5 percent dissolved salts, but the Dead Sea holds roughly a third of its weight in dissolved minerals, giving the water a density far higher than the human body. Because a floating object displaces its own weight in fluid, and the salty water weighs so much per volume, a swimmer needs to push aside only a shallow layer to stay up. The result is that people lie back and float effortlessly, unable to dive beneath the surface even if they try.
A lake with no way out
The extreme saltiness is a product of geography. The Dead Sea is a terminal lake, meaning water flows in but has no river carrying it out. The only way water leaves is by evaporating under the intense desert sun, and evaporation removes water while leaving every dissolved mineral behind. Over thousands of years, salts and other minerals have concentrated to their present extremes. As a detailed overview of the lake explains, the harsh chemistry is why almost nothing lives in the water, the very feature that gave the sea its ominous name.
How fast the water is disappearing
The decline is steep and accelerating. In recent decades the surface has been falling by more than a meter a year, up from a smaller rate in the 1970s and 1980s, and over the past half century the level has dropped by tens of meters. The surface area has contracted by roughly a third since the 1960s. The northern basin and the shallow southern basin have effectively split apart, with the southern end now sustained largely by industrial operations that pump water through evaporation ponds to extract valuable minerals.
The starved Jordan River
The main driver is upstream water use. The Jordan River historically delivered vast quantities of fresh water into the lake each year, but so much is now diverted for agriculture, drinking and industry across the region that only a fraction reaches the Dead Sea. With its principal source largely cut off and evaporation continuing unabated, the lake loses far more water than flows in, and the balance tips steadily toward retreat.
Sinkholes and a saltier future
The falling water level carries consequences beyond a receding shore. As the salty lake withdraws, fresh groundwater moves into the newly exposed ground and dissolves buried salt layers, causing the surface to collapse into thousands of sinkholes that swallow roads and buildings along the former coast. Meanwhile the remaining water grows saltier still, and salt crystals accumulate on the lakebed. Observing the process from orbit, a NASA analysis of the lake described how the increasingly concentrated brine precipitates salt onto the bottom, thickening a crust that grows year after year as the Dead Sea continues to vanish.
Efforts to slow the decline
The steady loss of the Dead Sea has prompted proposals to stabilize it, though none has proven simple. The most discussed idea over the years has been to channel water from the Red Sea, roughly 180 kilometers to the south, through a pipeline or canal that would replenish the shrinking lake while generating hydroelectric power and fresh water along the way. Such a scheme faces daunting engineering, financial and political hurdles, since the region’s water is shared among neighbors with competing needs, and scientists have warned that mixing chemically different waters could alter the lake in unpredictable ways, potentially spawning algae blooms or turning the water an unusual color. Restoring the flow of the Jordan River, the lake’s natural lifeline, would address the root cause more directly, but that would require the surrounding countries to give up water they currently rely on for farming and drinking. In the meantime, the mineral industries operating at the southern end continue to draw on the lake even as they pump water through evaporation ponds. The Dead Sea’s plight has become a case study in how a shared natural wonder can slip away when the demands placed on its water outstrip what the environment can supply, and in how difficult it is to reverse such a decline once it is underway.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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