The Dead Sea Dying Fast?

March 5th, 2009

The Dead Sea is the deepest point on Earth, but according to Shahrazad Abu Ghazleh and colleagues from the University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany its levels are dropping at an alarming rate. This drop is also feared to have serious environmental side-effects.

Before you dig your copy of An Inconvenient Truth from your home theatre seating room however, they say that the effects have nothing to do with climate change. Instead they have found that the increase in human water consumption in the area is the culprit.

The projected Dead Sea-Red Sea or Mediterranean-Dead Sea Channels therefore need a significant carrying capacity to re-fill the Dead Sea to its former level, in order to sustainably generate electricity and produce freshwater by desalinization.

In the case of the Dead Sea, the change in water level is due to intensive human water consumption from the Jordan and Yarmouk Rivers for irrigation, as well as the use of Dead Sea water for the potash industry by both Israel and Jordan. Over the last 30 years, this water consumption has caused an accelerated decrease in water level (0.7 m/a), volume (0.47 km³/a) and surface area (4 km² /a), according to this study.

The authors say that this rapid drop in the level of the Dead Sea has a number of dire consequences, which include higher pumping costs for the factories using the Dead Sea to extract potash, salt and magnesium; an accelerated outflow of fresh water from surrounding underground water aquifers; receding shorelines making it difficult for tourists to access the water for medicinal purposes; and the creation of a treacherous landscape of sinkholes and mud as a result of the dissolution of buried salt which causes severe damage to roads and civil engineering structures.

Sounds more like “business” consequences than environmental that they are worried about .

To address the mounting stress on water resources in the Dead Sea basin and the environmental hazards caused by its lowering, the authors suggest that the diversion of Jordan water to the Mediterranean coast could be replaced by desalinization of seawater, causing the recession of the Dead Sea to be considerably slowed, and buying time to consider the long-term alternatives such as the Red Sea-Dead Sea Channel or the Mediterranean-Dead Sea Channel.