- The Dead Sea is shrinking by 4 feet annually due to human activities.
- Regional politics and lack of urgency hinder efforts to save the unique ecosystem.
- Experts suggest stabilizing the decline, not restoring past levels, as a solution.
THE DEAD SEA — The motorboat cut through the aquamarine water of the Dead Sea, past dazzling-white formations forged from salt crystals. Jake Ben Zaken, the boat captain, pointed to a patch of darker water nearby indicating a sinkhole beneath the seabed. These are both signs of an unfolding ecological disaster, he said.
The Dead Sea sits where Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian land meet and is a place of extremes. It's the lowest point on the planet, around 1,400 feet below sea level. It's also one of the world's saltiest water bodies, nearly 10 times saltier than the ocean, which makes the water so dense people can float effortlessly on its surface.
But this unique body of water is dying. Every year it recedes around 4 feet, as the impacts of human activities and climate change take a heavy toll. Over the past five decades, its surface area has shrunk by roughly a third. As the water retreats, it's forging a new landscape of sinkholes and salt-encrusted shorelines that is both strikingly beautiful and a haunting reminder that the Dead Sea's future hangs in the balance.
Ben Zaken, who runs the company Salty Landscapes from Mitzpe Shalem, a settlement in the West Bank, has been taking people out onto the Dead Sea for more than 12 years. It's given him a front row seat to the alarming changes.
His boat tours used to start from Mineral Beach, just to the south of Mitzpe Shalem, but he was forced to move when sinkholes closed it in 2015. His current location is safe for now, but the landscape is shifting fast. "Every year we get about 7½ meters of new shoreline," Ben Zaken said.
There are multiple plans to save the Dead Sea, but the years tick by and little happens as costs, fraught regional politics and a lack of political urgency stymie action, experts told CNN. Unless something is done, the world risks losing a unique ecosystem, they warned.
"It is a treasure," said Peleg Gottdiener, of EcoPeace Middle East, an organization of Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian environmentalists. "There's nothing like the Dead Sea."
This landlocked swath of salty water is technically a lake. Water enters from the Jordan River, which starts on the Syria-Lebanon border, flows through the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, then continues its journey south toward the Dead Sea, with Jordan on one side and Israel and the occupied West Bank on the other.
Over the decades, the Jordan River, and its main tributary the Yarmouk, have shrunk as they've been dammed and diverted by Israel, Syria and Jordan to quench the thirst of people, crops and livestock. The river used to transport 1.3 billion cubic meters of water to the Dead Sea; that has fallen to roughly 100 million cubic meters.
The mineral extraction industry is a major driver of decline.
In the late 1970s, the Dead Sea split into two basins, now separated by a strip of dry land. The deeper northern basin, where Ben Zaken operates his boat tours, is the natural remnant of the sea. The southern basin is artificially maintained, made up of a series of industrial evaporation pools.
Companies on the Israeli and Jordanian sides — the Dead Sea Works and the Arab Potash Company — pump water from the northern basin into the pools. The water evaporates in the sun, leaving behind a mineral-rich brine, from which companies extract minerals including potash and magnesium for fertilizers and other industrial uses.
There's another force at work too: climate change. Droughts are becoming fiercer and more prolonged, and rainfall is rarer. Even without river diversions and industry, there's evidence climate change impacts would cause the Dead Sea to shrink, albeit far more slowly, said Yael Kiro, a geochemist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, who studies the Dead Sea.
As it shrinks, the Dead Sea is changing. It's becoming even saltier. Since the 1980s, concentrations of salt in the water have become too high to remain dissolved, said professor Nadav Lensky, director of the Dead Sea Observatory at the Geological Survey of Israel.
This causes the salt to form solid crystals, which drift like snow down to the sea floor, creating natural salt sculptures. Most crystals accumulate as salt layers forming intricate structures that can take many shapes, influenced by water temperature and currents. Some look like chimneys, others like domes or mushrooms.
The retreating water is also changing the landscape in a more dangerous way.
At an entrance to Ein Gedi, a once-popular Dead Sea beach resort now permanently closed, a big yellow sign reads "no entry for pedestrians." It's soon clear why. The road toward the shore has been carved up by huge, circular sinkholes.
To get closer to the water means picking your way past the sinkholes and over fallen palm trees. A restaurant, changing rooms and gas station all stand abandoned nearer the shoreline. A set of broken steps leads down to a beach now so far away it's impossible to see. The resort has an eerie, almost apocalyptic feel.
The sinkholes that closed Ein Gedi, and other Dead Sea beaches, are a direct result of the water's retreat, Kiro said. Rapidly dropping water levels allow freshwater to seep into the ground, dissolving the ancient layers of salt and creating underground cavities. When these grow too large, the ground above eventually collapses, causing sinkholes to open up suddenly and without warning.
There are now more than 6,000 sinkholes around the Dead Sea, and they threaten businesses and residents as well as tourism, which, on the Israeli side, is now almost exclusively in the industrial southern basin. Few tourists will likely realize that they're bathing in an artificial evaporation pond.
The need to halt the Dead Sea's decline is urgent, but there is no simple solution.
One idea is to find a new source of water to replenish it. In 2013, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed a memorandum of understanding to explore the idea of pumping water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea.
The plan involved constructing a desalination plant on the Jordanian coast to produce freshwater and building a pipeline, more than 100 miles long, to bring the salty brine created during desalination to the Dead Sea.
Some environmental experts are concerned that adding water with a different chemical composition could cause algae blooms or the formation of white gypsum crystals in the Dead Sea.
EcoPeace's Gottdeiner said a big hurdle to any solution is that ultimately "there's no sense of urgency" at a political level. He and other experts believe it's probably impossible to restore the Dead Sea to the level it was a few decades ago; the focus instead should be on stabilizing its decline.
Contributing: Zeena Saifi and Jeremy Diamond
