On the shore of the Dead Sea there are beach resorts where the beach has run away from the buildings. Lidos built at the waterline in the 1980s now stand a kilometre or more from the sea they were made for, stranded up slopes of cracked salt-crusted mud, and the access roads that chase the retreating shore must be periodically rebuilt as the ground beneath them collapses. The lowest exposed place on the planet is getting lower: the lake's surface, already more than 430 metres below sea level, is dropping by roughly a metre every year.
The Dead Sea earned its name honestly. Shared between Israel, Jordan and the West Bank in the deep trench of the Jordan Rift Valley, it is technically not a sea at all but a terminal salt lake. Its water is about ten times saltier than the ocean — a brine so dense that bathers bob on the surface like corks, famously able to read a newspaper while floating, and so hostile that no fish or plant survives it, though salt-loving microbes quietly disprove the "dead" label. Antiquity prized the place. The Romans knew it as Palus Asphaltites for the lumps of natural bitumen that floated up from its depths, a substance the Egyptians used in embalming; Herod the Great built palace-fortresses above its shore, including Masada; and in 1947 a Bedouin shepherd searching for a stray animal near Qumran tossed a stone into a cave and cracked open a jar containing the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Why the sea is shrinking
The Dead Sea is a terminal lake: water arrives, overwhelmingly from the River Jordan, and leaves only by evaporation in the ferocious desert heat. For millennia the books balanced and the level held roughly steady. The modern crisis began when the river was plumbed. From the 1960s, Israel's National Water Carrier and a series of Jordanian and Syrian dams diverted the Jordan's flow to taps and farms, cutting the water reaching the lake to a small fraction of its natural volume; the surface has since fallen by tens of metres. Industry drinks much of the rest: at the southern end, Israeli and Jordanian potash companies pump Dead Sea brine into vast evaporation ponds to harvest potash and other minerals, a process reckoned to account for roughly a third of the ongoing loss. The result is a lake in two pieces. The deep northern basin is the shrinking "real" Dead Sea; the shallow southern basin dried out decades ago and is now, in effect, an industrial saltworks — the famous hotels at Ein Bokek actually stand beside an evaporation pond whose level is artificially maintained.
The retreat has a vicious side effect. As the brine withdraws, fresh groundwater flows in behind it and dissolves a buried layer of salt, hollowing out cavities that suddenly swallow the surface. Thousands of sinkholes have opened along the western shore since the 1980s — gulping down date plantations, stretches of road and part of a campsite — and they have forced the abandonment of beaches and buildings along whole sections of coast. Geologists can map where they are likely, but not predict the moment the ground gives way.
The Red–Dead rescue plan
Schemes to refill the lake with seawater are older than the crisis — Victorian engineers mused about canals from the Mediterranean — but the modern version is the Red Sea–Dead Sea conveyance, agreed in outline by Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority in 2013. The idea: desalinate Red Sea water at Aqaba for drought-stricken Jordan, and pipe the leftover concentrated brine 180-odd kilometres north to top up the Dead Sea. Environmental scientists have never loved it. Mixing sulphate-rich seawater into the calcium-rich lake could bleach the surface with white gypsum or tint it with red algal blooms, transforming the very chemistry that makes the place unique; and the project's cost, in the billions, kept slipping beyond reach. After years of delay the scheme was effectively shelved in the early 2020s, with Jordan pursuing desalination alone.
Hydrologists offer one consolation: the Dead Sea will not actually die. As it shrinks, its brine grows denser and evaporation slows, so the lake is heading not for extinction but for a smaller, hypersaline equilibrium — perhaps centuries away. What is vanishing is the Dead Sea that humans knew: the shoreline of Herod and the scroll caves, retreating year by year down a slope of salt. The lowest place on Earth keeps setting its own record.
Quiz nuggets
- The Dead Sea's surface, more than 430 metres below sea level, is the lowest exposed point on Earth — and drops about a metre a year.
- Its water is roughly ten times saltier than the ocean; the Romans called it Palus Asphaltites after its floating bitumen.
- The first Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd in a cave near Qumran.
- Potash-industry evaporation ponds are reckoned to cause roughly a third of the lake's water loss.
- The Red Sea–Dead Sea conveyance, agreed by Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority in 2013, was effectively shelved in the early 2020s.