Dead Sea

• 1. Lowest Shore on Earth

  ›

  In 68 CE, the Roman commander Vespasian reached the Dead Sea and carried out a grim experiment. He had captives who could not swim bound and thrown into the water, to see how it would hold them. The Dead Sea is a landlocked salt lake, with Jordan on its eastern side, the West Bank to the west and Israel to the southwest. As of 2025, its surface lies 439.78 meters below sea level, which makes its shores the lowest land-based elevation on Earth. The lake is also 304 meters deep, making it the deepest hypersaline lake in the world. Its main northern basin stretches 50 kilometers in length and 15 kilometers across at its widest point. It sits in the Jordan Rift Valley, and the Jordan River is its main tributary. Yet no stream leaves it. How did such a basin come to exist? What is in this water that makes it so unlike the ocean? And why are three neighboring peoples now arguing over how to keep the lake from disappearing?

  636646961

• 2. A Lake of Many Names

  ›

  Greek and Roman geographers usually called the lake Asphalt Lake, in Greek Asphaltites and in Latin Lacus Asphaltites. The label came from the black bitumen that floated free on the water. Ancient traders moved so much of it that the name stuck.

  The Greeks and Romans also had a name that matches the modern one, Nekra Thalassa in Greek and Mare Mortuum in Latin. The Arabic name came from these, and the English name copies the Arabic. The second-century Roman historian Tacitus preferred another term, the Jewish Sea, or Iudaicum mare.

  Hebrew offers the oldest known name, the Salt Sea, and it is still the most common in both biblical and modern Hebrew. The Bible also calls the lake the Sea of Arabah and the Eastern Sea. The phrase Dead Sea turns up only occasionally in Hebrew writing, as Yam HamMavet.

  Arabic speakers say al-Bahr al-Mayyit, and they also say Bahr Lut, the Sea of Lot. Lot was the nephew of Abraham, and his wife was said to have turned into a pillar of salt when Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. English once used the Lake of Sodom for the same reason. A rarer Arabic name, the Sea of Zoara, honors a once important city on the shore. Genesis counts Zoar among five Cities of the Plain, and it alone escaped destruction when Lot fled there.

  101112186

• 3. Rift, Lagoon and Salt

  ›

  The Dead Sea Transform is a fault that slides sideways along the boundary between the African Plate and the Arabian Plate. It runs from the East Anatolian Fault zone in Turkey to the northern end of the Red Sea Rift, near the southern tip of Sinai. Geologists disagree about how it carved out the low basin. An older view holds that the Dead Sea sits in a true rift, an extension of the Red Sea Rift or even of the Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa. A newer view blames a step-over along the fault, which stretched the crust and let it sink.

  During the late Pliocene and early Pleistocene, Mediterranean water repeatedly flooded the valley that now holds the Jordan River, the Dead Sea and the northern Wadi Arabah. Geologists call the narrow, crooked bay the Sedom Lagoon. It reached through what is now the Jezreel Valley and stretched from the Sea of Galilee to about 50 kilometers beyond today's southern shore. The Hula Depression never joined it, because that ground stood too high. The lagoon left rock salt behind, in a layer that eventually reached about 2.3 kilometers thick.

  According to the researcher Kafri, the Pliocene ended about 2.5 million years ago, and sea level then stood 50 to 100 meters above today's. When the ocean fell back, the lagoon became a landlocked lake, and heavy evaporation pulled it toward the deeper southern end of the rift. Mordechai Stein considers the process unsettled and suggests that tectonic movement may have helped block the Mediterranean.

  Three lakes followed the lagoon. Lake Amora came first, then Lake Lisan, which lasted from about 70,000 to 14,000 years ago, and finally the Dead Sea as its last remnant. Between 70,000 and 12,000 years ago, Lake Lisan stood 100 to 250 meters higher than the present level. It peaked around 26,000 years ago, which points to a very wet climate across West Asia. Around 10,000 years ago the level fell sharply, probably below today's. Volcanic activity is ruled out, so a seismic event may be responsible. Over the last several thousand years the level has swung by roughly 400 meters.

  The floor of Lake Amora gathered heavy sediment, and the weight squeezed the older salt upward. Geologists compare it to pressing a flat stone into a bucket of mud, which forces the mud up the sides. When the basin floor dropped further, the risen salt stayed behind as cliffs, forming the Lisan Peninsula and Mount Sodom. Mount Sodom, on the southwestern side, is a halite formation 210 meters tall.

  2627282930

• 4. Water Unlike the Ocean

  ›

  A salinity of 342 grams per kilogram, or 34.2 percent in 2011, makes the Dead Sea 9.6 times as salty as the ocean. The water has a density of 1.24 kilograms per litre, so swimming feels like floating. The Great Salt Lake in Utah behaves in a similar way. The Dead Sea is not the saltiest water anywhere. Lake Vanda in Antarctica reaches 35 percent, Lake Assal in Djibouti 34.8 percent, and Garabogazköl lagoon on the Caspian up to 35 percent. Don Juan Pond, in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, reaches 44 percent.

  The recipe differs from seawater as much as the strength does. In the early 1980s, the salts in the surface water were 50.8 percent magnesium chloride, 30.4 percent sodium chloride, 14.4 percent calcium chloride and 4.4 percent potassium chloride. Most oceans and seas are about 85 percent sodium chloride. Sulfate is very scarce in the Dead Sea, while bromide is the highest in any water on Earth.

  The lake was less salty in the 19th century. A sample tested by Bernays then had a salinity of 19 percent, and the density was between 1.15 and 1.17 grams per cubic centimeter. By 1926 the salinity had risen, though researchers suspected it also varied by season and by distance from the Jordan's mouth.

  Until the winter of 1978-79, the lake held two separate layers. The top 35 meters or so had a salinity near 30 percent and a temperature swinging between 19 and 37 degrees Celsius. Below a transition zone lay water at a steady 22 degrees, over 34 percent salt and fully saturated with sodium chloride. From the 1960s, irrigation and low rainfall cut the Jordan's inflow, and by 1975 the upper layer had become saltier than the lower one. It stayed on top only because it was warmer and lighter. When it cooled enough to become denser, the layers mixed, and for the first time in centuries the lake was one uniform body. Stratification has since begun to return.

  The lake also gives up something odd from its depths. Deep seeps constantly push up small pebbles and blocks of black asphalt. Archaeologists have found asphalt-coated figurines and bitumen-coated Neolithic skulls at ancient sites. Egyptian mummification used asphalt imported from this region.

  841444547

• 5. Life and Healing

  ›

  In 1980, after an unusually rainy winter, the normally dark blue Dead Sea turned red. Researchers from Hebrew University of Jerusalem found the water teeming with an alga called Dunaliella. The alga fed red-pigmented halobacteria, and the bacteria changed the color of the lake. Heavy floods can dilute the salt to 30 percent or lower, which lets the sea briefly come to life. Since 1980 the basin has been dry and the algae and bacteria have not returned in measurable numbers.

  Normally, the salt keeps out fish and aquatic plants, and only tiny quantities of bacteria and microbial fungi survive. In 2011, scientists from Be'er Sheva in Israel and from Germany dived to the lake floor and found fissures letting in fresh and brackish water. Biofilms around the fissures held numerous species of bacteria and archaea.

  The air around the lake is also unusual. Rainfall is scarcely 100 millimeters a year in the north and barely 50 in the south, because the Judaean Mountains cast a rainshadow. Summer temperatures average between 32 and 39 degrees Celsius, and the region has 192 days a year above 30 degrees. The ultraviolet radiation is weaker, especially the UVB rays that cause sunburn. Barometric pressure of 1061 to 1065 hectopascals is about 5 percent above the standard sea-level figure, and the air holds 3.3 to 4.8 percent more oxygen. Pollen and other allergens are scarce.

  These traits made the shore a testing ground for treatments. Climatotherapy uses local weather, heliotherapy uses sunlight, and thalassotherapy uses bathing in the water. Patients with reduced lung function from cystic fibrosis seem to benefit from the higher pressure. Researchers link the unusual ultraviolet spectrum to effective sun treatment for psoriasis, since reduced radiation allows longer sunbathing. One study found that nasal irrigation with Dead Sea saline eased rhinosinusitis symptoms better than a standard hypertonic spray. Researchers at Ben Gurion University of the Negev say mineral-rich mud compresses may temporarily relieve knee osteoarthritis pain and can supplement conventional care.

  3748495154

• 6. Fortresses, Monks and Scrolls

  ›

  According to the Hebrew Bible, people lived in caves near the Dead Sea before the Israelites arrived in Canaan, and extensively in the time of King David. David was said to have hidden from Saul at Ein Gedi. In the First Temple period, Judah ruled the western shore, Moab held the eastern shore, and the Edomites lived to the south. Judah built several fortresses to guard its coast and profit from salt, bitumen and cash crops. Ein Gedi and Jericho were vital centers for growing prized Judean date palms. Ein Gedi thrived as an economic hub in Judah's final century, until its destruction on the eve of the Babylonian captivity. The prophet Ezekiel foresaw the sea being "healed and made fresh", and Zechariah foresaw living waters flowing from Jerusalem to the eastern sea.

  Greek and Jewish writers report that the Nabateans held a monopoly over the lake. Archaeologists have found anchorages on both sides, including Ein Gedi, Numeira, a spot near Masada and Khirbet Mazin, where a Hasmonean-era dry dock lies in ruins. Herod the Great, king of Judaea, built or rebuilt fortresses and palaces on the western shore, and Masada is the most famous. On the eastern bank stood Machaerus, where, according to Josephus, Herod Antipas imprisoned John the Baptist, who died there. Josephus himself used the Greek name Asphaltites for the lake.

  Some Essenes, an ascetic Jewish sect, settled on the western shore. Pliny the Elder placed them on the west side, away from the coast, above the town of Engeda. Most scholars accept, though some still dispute it, that the Qumran community was Essene and that the Dead Sea Scrolls were its library. Archaeology suggests Qumran was destroyed during the First Jewish-Roman War of 66-73 CE. Early in that war a radical sect, the Sicarii, seized Masada and killed its Roman garrison. They held out after the Second Temple fell in 70 CE, until the siege by the Roman Legio X Fretensis in 73 or 74 CE. Josephus says 960 inhabitants died by suicide. Jewish slaves built the Roman camps around the fortress, and they received water from the Ein Feshcha springs and other sweetwater sources.

  Ein Gedi appears many times in the Mishna. It produced persimmon for the temple's fragrance and for export, using a secret recipe. Salt from Sodom was essential to the temple's holy incense, but it was said to be dangerous at home and able to cause blindness.

  The sixth-century Madaba Map, a mosaic, shows that trade across the lake was busy under Byzantine rule. The remote Judean wilderness drew Greek Orthodox monks, and monasteries such as Saint George in Wadi Kelt and Mar Saba are still places of pilgrimage. The Jewish village of Ein Gedi, inhabited since the 5th century BCE, was destroyed by fire in the 7th century. From that century the region declined and its population fell. Sugarcane farming on the northern and southern shores began in the Crusader period and peaked under the Mamluks.

  In the 19th century, explorers took boats onto the water. Christopher Costigan went in 1835, Thomas Howard Molyneux in 1847, William Francis Lynch in 1848 and John MacGregor in 1869. Charles Leonard Irby and James Mangles traveled the shores in 1817-18 without sailing on it. After the Moabite Stone was found on the plateau east of the lake in 1868, Moses Wilhelm Shapira and his partner Salim al-Khouri forged and sold many supposed Moabite antiquities. In 1883 Shapira presented the Shapira Strips, a supposed ancient scroll on leather. The strips were declared forgeries, and Shapira took his own life in disgrace. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, hundreds of Jewish religious documents dated between 150 BCE and 70 CE turned up in caves near Qumran, about a mile inland from the northwestern shore. They became the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  5658596166

• 7. Potash, Bromine and Tourists

  ›

  Moses Novomeysky, a Siberian Jewish engineer who had pioneered the use of Lake Baikal, first visited the Dead Sea in 1911. He spent over ten years seeking a charter. Early in the 20th century, chemists had deduced that the lake was a natural deposit of potash and bromine. In 1929 the British Mandatory government granted a concession to the new Palestine Potash Company. Its first plant, at Kalya on the north shore, began production in 1931 and made potash by solar evaporation of brine. It employed Arabs and Jews, and it was called an island of peace in turbulent times. A second plant opened in 1934 on the southwest shore, near Mount Sodom. During World War II the company supplied half of Britain's potash. Jordanian forces destroyed both plants in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

  Israel founded the Dead Sea Works in 1952 as a state-owned enterprise built on the company's remnants. It was privatized in 1995 and is now owned by Israel Chemicals. In 2001 it produced 1.77 million tons of potash, 206,000 tons of bromine, 44,900 tons of caustic soda and 25,000 tons of magnesium metal. Israeli companies earn around US$3 billion a year from Dead Sea minerals and their derived products. On the Jordanian side, Arab Potash was formed in 1956 and makes 2.0 million tons of potash a year at Safi. Jordan's Dead Sea mineral industries bring in about $1.2 billion in sales, equal to 4 percent of its GDP. Both firms use vast evaporation pans that have diked off the whole southern end of the lake to produce carnallite, and a central dike follows the international border.

  Skin care companies have also shown interest in Dead Sea salts, because of the sea's reputation for healing. Tourism grew alongside them. The British built a golf course at Kalia named for Sodom and Gomorrah. Israel's first major hotels went up in Arad, and since the 1960s at the Ein Bokek resort complex. Its 15 hotels earned $291 million in 2012, mostly along a 6-kilometer stretch of the southern shore. Jordan's side has nine international franchise resorts near the King Hussein Bin Talal Convention Center, with a capacity of 2,800 rooms. On the 22nd of November 2015, the Dead Sea panorama road joined 40 archaeological locations in Jordan on Google Street View.

  The Palestinian share of the coast is about 40 kilometers long. The World Bank estimates that tourism there could earn $290 million a year and create 2,900 jobs, and that a chemical industry could add $918 million in annual value, "almost equivalent to the contribution of the entire manufacturing sector of Palestinian territories today". Access limits and permit problems block both. Permits can only be sought through the Joint Committees set up under the Oslo Agreement, and the relevant committee has not met regularly since 2000.

  7980818235

• 8. A Sea in Retreat

  ›

  When continuous monitoring began in 1930, the Dead Sea covered 1050 square kilometers and stood 390 meters below sea level. Its surface area is now 605 square kilometers. The shrinking has been steepest since the 1960s, when the National Water Carrier, completed in 1964, diverted water from the Jordan River. The Jordan now supplies only about one-sixth of the inflow, less than direct rainfall. EcoPeace Middle East, a joint Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian environmental group, estimates that less than 100 million cubic meters a year now arrives from the river, against former flows of 1.2 to 1.3 billion. The water of Wadi Hassa is now fully consumed in Jordan. Wadi Mujib, 420 meters below sea level, still feeds the lake from inside a 212-square-kilometer biosphere reserve.

  The level fell from 395 meters below sea level in 1970 to 418 in 2006, a drop that reached 1 meter a year. The surface has lost about 33 percent of its area since the 1960s. The southern end is fed by a canal maintained by the Dead Sea Works. Flash floods now pour into sinkholes along the shore, so even less rain reaches the lake.

  As the sea falls, groundwater falls with it. Fresh water flushes out the brines that once filled underground layers near the shore, dissolving salt and leaving cavities that suddenly collapse. Ein Gedi has suffered many sinkholes. Most beach resorts on the west shore of the northern basin have been shut, leaving just three near the basin's northwest tip.

  In May 2009 at the World Economic Forum, Jordan unveiled a plan to bring Red Sea water from near Aqaba to the Dead Sea. The water would be desalinated along the way to supply Jordan, and the leftover brine would replenish the lake. Israel supported the idea. At a regional conference in July 2009, officials worried about falling levels, and some suggested reducing industry around the lake or increasing the Jordan's flow. In October 2009, Jordan sped up its plan to draw around 300 million cubic meters a year from the Red Sea, despite concerns about too little time to study the environmental impact. Jordan's water minister, Maysoun Zu'bi, called it the first phase of the Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance.

  In December 2013, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority signed an agreement for a pipeline 180 kilometers long, estimated to take up to five years to build. Reports in January 2015 still put the drop at 1 meter a year. On the 27th of November 2016, Jordan shortlisted five consortia. Its water ministry said a $100 million first phase would start building in the first quarter of 2018 and finish by 2021. The project was officially abandoned in June 2021, having never broken ground, so the shoreline keeps falling with no replacement water on the way.

  899395588