Four feet a year: How the Dead Sea is running out of water

The Dead Sea sits where Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian land meet, and almost everything about it runs to extremes. At around 1,400 feet below sea level, it is the lowest point on the planet.

Its water is nearly 10 times saltier than the ocean, so dense that a person can lie back and float without any effort. For many visitors, that is the whole appeal.But the water they float on is going away. Every year the sea recedes by around 4 feet. Over the past five decades, its surface area has shrunk by roughly a third. What the retreating water leaves behind is a new landscape of salt-encrusted shorelines and sinkholes, striking to look at and, increasingly, risky to stand on.A lake that is called a seaTechnically, the Dead Sea is a lake. It is landlocked, and its water arrives mainly through the Jordan River, which begins on the Syria-Lebanon border, passes through the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel and continues south, with Jordan on one side and Israel and the occupied West Bank on the other.The geography explains how fragile the arrangement is. A landlocked lake depends on what flows into it.

When that supply is cut, nothing else makes up the difference, and the water level falls.A river that barely reaches itOver the decades, the Jordan and its main tributary, the Yarmouk, have shrunk as they have been dammed and diverted by Israel, Syria and Jordan. The water has gone to people, crops and livestock, the most basic demands in a dry region.

The scale of the loss is hard to overstate. The river once carried 1.3 billion cubic meters of water to the Dead Sea.

That has fallen to roughly 100 million cubic meters, a drop of more than 90 percent. The sea now receives less than a tenth of what it once did. Each diversion may make sense on its own terms, but added together they have starved the lake at its source.Two basins, one of them man-madeMineral extraction is the other 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 these pools. The sun evaporates the water and leaves behind a mineral-rich brine.

From that brine, the companies extract minerals including potash and magnesium, which go into fertilizers and other industrial products.The result is a sea squeezed from both ends: very little coming in from the river, and a steady draw going out to the pools in the south.Climate change adds to the pressureThere is a third force at work. Droughts are becoming fiercer and more prolonged, and rainfall is rarer. There is evidence that climate change would cause the Dead Sea to shrink even without the river diversions and the mineral industry.

The difference is speed: on its own, the climate effect would be far slower.

That distinction is worth keeping in view. Climate change is not the only reason the sea is declining, and treating it as the sole cause would let the other drivers off the hook. What it does is tighten the squeeze, by making an already stressed water system drier still.A problem with many ownersThe causes of the decline are spread across borders. The Jordan and the Yarmouk have been dammed and diverted by three countries.

The industries drawing from the northern basin operate on both the Israeli and Jordanian sides. The sea itself touches Israel, Jordan and the occupied West Bank.No single decision explains the shrinking, and that may be part of why it has continued for so long. Each user takes a share of the water, and the sea absorbs the combined result, at around 4 feet a year.The sea is turning to saltAs it shrinks, the Dead Sea is also becoming saltier. Since the 1980s, concentrations of salt in the water have become too high for the salt to remain dissolved, said Professor Nadav Lensky, director of the Dead Sea Observatory at the Geological Survey of Israel.The excess salt forms solid crystals that drift down to the sea floor like snow. Most of them accumulate as layers, building intricate structures whose shapes are influenced by water temperature and currents. Some look like chimneys, others like domes or mushrooms. They are, in effect, natural salt sculptures, formed out of sight beneath the surface.Ground that gives wayThe retreating water is changing the land in a more dangerous way.

At an entrance to Ein Gedi, a once-popular Dead Sea beach resort that is now permanently closed, a big yellow sign reads "no entry for pedestrians." The reason becomes clear quickly. The road toward the shore has been carved up by huge, circular sinkholes.

Ein Gedi is part of a much larger pattern. There are now more than 6,000 sinkholes around the Dead Sea, and they threaten businesses and residents as well as tourism.

A resort that once drew bathers now stands behind a warning sign, its approach road broken up.Tourism moves to the artificial poolsOn the Israeli side, tourism is now almost exclusively in the industrial southern basin. The natural northern basin, with its retreating shoreline and sinkhole-ridden ground, is no longer where the visitors are. They are in the pools that the mineral companies maintain.Few of those tourists are likely to realize that they are bathing in an artificial evaporation pond.

The experience that built the Dead Sea's reputation, floating in impossibly dense water, has in effect been relocated to the industrial side of the sea.A future in the balanceThe story of the Dead Sea is one of cumulative choices. River water was diverted for people and farms. Seawater was pumped into pools for minerals. Rainfall became scarcer. None of these pressures is mysterious, and together they have taken around 4 feet off the sea every year and roughly a third of its surface area over five decades.What the retreat leaves behind is both beautiful and unsettling: salt-encrusted shorelines, crystal formations on the sea floor, and thousands of sinkholes. For now, the water is still dense enough to hold a person up. Whether there will be enough of it left to keep that true is the open question.