“What would you say if I told you that the Dead Sea may completely disappear by 2100?”
“Here, more than 430 m below sea level in the deepest depression in the world, the Dead Sea is dying. This expanse of salt water, so dense that you float effortlessly, is receding by about 1 m 20 every year. To measure the scale of this hemorrhage, keep in mind that in just 50 years, it has lost a third of its surface area.”
“This retreat leaves behind a landscape of desolation. A ground that literally collapses beneath the feet of residents. Tourist complexes, once flagships of global thermalism, are now nothing more than abandoned concrete carcasses in the middle of nowhere. But beyond the ecological and economic disaster, this agony raises a question that has obsessed engineers, geologists, and heads of state for more than a century.”
“Is it possible to save the Dead Sea? A question that has already been studied through a canal project to refill the Dead Sea with the waters of the Red Sea. In this new episode of Looking For, we’ll dive to the bottom of the Dead Sea to understand how a millennial balance could tip into the spiral that no one seems willing to stop. From giant sinkholes devouring the shoreline to heavy industry extracting its last riches to transboundary canal projects linking two seas across the desert, this is the story and the future fate of the Dead Sea. The perils and the ultimate rescue hopes of the lowest point on our planet.”
“To understand the current agony of the Dead Sea, we must first autopsy the terrain. Let us forget political borders for a moment and watch the Earth fracture. We’re here on the Levant Fault, a fracture of the Earth’s crust more than 6,000 km long that extends the East African rift system.”
“It’s the point of friction between the African plate and the Arabian plate which have been sliding past one another for millions of years. The Arabian plate is moving northward while the African plate slides southward. This lateral shearing movement does not occur without friction.”
“Stresses accumulate until they trigger abrupt shifts which have gradually stretched the region’s soil. Under the effect of this extension, the crust thinned, losing its structural strength until it caused a massive subsidence of the bedrock. This process gave rise to what geologists call a pull-aart basin, a colossal depression located between two fault segments, creating the abyssal chasm that now houses the Dead Sea.”
“Yet, this area has not always been the mineral immensity we know. About 20,000 years ago, at the end of the last glacial period, the valley hosted a colossus, Lake Lissan. The body of water stretched over more than 200 km, flooding the entire basin from the Sea of Galilee to the far reaches of the Arab. But with the climatic warming at the beginning of the holysine, this reservoir began an irreversible retreat.”
“As it evaporated, Lake Lissan fragmented, leaving behind three isolated remnants: the Sea of Galilee to the north, the Jordan River in the center, and at the very end of the chain, at the lowest point of the depression, the Dead Sea. Here lies the particularity of its existence, but also its vulnerability, endurism.”
“The Dead Sea is what is called an enduric lake. In the language of geographers, this means that no river, no stream, no canal flows out of it to join a sea or ocean. It’s a geographical dead end. For millennia, a natural balance was maintained thanks to a mechanism of perpetual evaporation. The Jordan poured in its fresh waters loaded with sediments and minerals torn from the basaltic and limestone rocks of the region.”
“While under heat regularly exceeding 45° C, the Dead Sea acted as a giant evaporator. In this white hot basin, water rises into the atmosphere but leaves behind its densest components, salts and minerals. It’s this uninterrupted concentration repeated over millennia that transformed an ordinary lake into a saturated solution, 10 times saltier than any ocean on the planet.”
“This physical singularity has always fascinated from the dawn of civilizations. For the authors of the Old Testament, it was the stage of divine judgment, the tomb of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. These stories of sulfur and fire echo the geological reality of the area. In this active seismic fracture zone, bitumen upwellings were so frequent in antiquity that the Greeks called it the asphaltite lake.”
“Blocks of black bitumen regularly rose to the surface, visible testimonies of hydrocarbons trapped deep within the fault. But if the Dead Sea inspired fear, it was also coveted for its mineral wealth. In antiquity, it was a strategic crossroads for trade routes linking Arabia to the Mediterranean. Aristotle himself mentioned with astonishment these waters so dense that anybody floats effortlessly.”
“This fascination influenced the political conquests of the time. Legend has it that Queen Cleopatra demanded that Mark Anthony take control of the region not to expand territory but to secure access to its raw minerals. Bitumen essential for embalming and ship corking and above all the precious salts. For centuries, pilgrims and travelers flocked to immerse themselves in these waters saturated with magnesium and potassium recognized for their therapeutic virtues.”
“The Dead Sea was a geological jewel, a relic of a balance that seemed eternal. But today, this monument of nature is collapsing. Its shoreline is riddled with cracks. Its surface is shrunk by a third, and its millennial sanctuary is now only a sea in agony. The millennial harmony we have described did not break by accident.”
“It gave way under the pressure of vital freshwater needs. In this region of the world, the calculation is simple and brutal. The Middle East is home to 5% of the world’s population, but is less than 1% of the planet’s drinking water. To find the source of the problem, we must go back north, where the landscapes are still green, to the Sea of Galilee.”
“It’s Israel’s only freshwater reservoir. For millennia, its waters flowed freely southward following the course of the Jordan. Each year, it injected the volumes necessary to compensate for natural evaporation. But in the 1950s, man literally closed the valve. Faced with a booming demography, the young Hebrew state built Israel’s national water carrier.”
“A titanic project to divert the lake’s waters toward the coastal cities and the sands of the Negev. The objective was clear. Make the desert bloom, whatever the cost. Technically, it is an achievement. Hydrologically, it is an amputation. Today, more than 96% of the historic flow of the Jordan no longer reaches its mouth.”
“This diversion, however, is only half of the equation. If the Dead Sea evaporates due to lack of inflow, it’s also siphoned for what it contains. To understand the persistence of nations on this lake, one must look at the resource map. The region’s subsoil is desperately empty. No coal, no steel, no precious metals.”
“In this deprivation, the Dead Sea is the only truly exploitable wealth, a mineral windfall without equivalent. This is where the economic fate of the region is decided. This lake holds a white gold, potash. For Jordan, this component, indispensable to global fertilizers, represents a vital market of $500 million per year.”
“On the Israeli side, exploitation generates billions of dollars by exporting magnesium, bromine, and table salts. For these governments, the Dead Sea is not a sanctuary to preserve. It’s an operating account. This reality has physically disfigured the landscape, creating a sharp fracture visible from space.”
“The Dead Sea is now split into two worlds. To the north, a natural basin that is sinking. To the south, a geometric industrial complex, a grid of artificial evaporation ponds. It’s no longer a sea, it’s a factory. To facilitate extraction, these ponds are only 1 m 80 deep, an optimized thickness so that the sun evaporates the water as quickly as possible.”
“Once the minerals are harvested, these industrial pools dry out and must be refilled again. The industry then pumps massively from the northern basin to keep its facilities on life support. Satellite images taken between 1972 and 2021 reveal this absurd transfer. The natural part is drained to feed the financial yield of the South.”
“The Dead Sea is caught in a vice, dried at its source and siphoned at its base. It is ceased to be an autonomous ecosystem. Approaching the shores of the Dead Sea today means observing a permanent panorama. What maps still indicate as a shoreline is now nothing more than a horizon of sediments.”
“Where the waves once reached the road, only a cracked expanse remains. In some places, the shoreline has retreated by more than 2 km, transforming former seaside resorts into absurd belvederes overlooking a desert of salt. This massive retreat has reactivated an unstable geological mechanism, sinkholes. Beneath the surface, the process is mechanical.”
“As it receded, the sea left behind thick layers of rock salt trapped in the subsoil for millennia. As long as these strata remained saturated with brine, the ground stayed stable. But today, freshwater tables descending from the Judean mountains infiltrate these now exposed salt layers. Fresh water dissolves the salt, creating immense underground cavities.”
“Pockets of emptiness invisible from the surface. Without any warning sign, the ground eventually gives way under its own weight. The Earth suddenly splits open. There are now more than 6,000 of these craters along the shoreline, and the count is accelerating. Each month, new craters appear, swallowing palm plantations or tourist infrastructures.”
“Geologists estimate that at the current rate, more than 500 new holes will open each year. The shoreline has become an unpredictable zone where the question is no longer whether the ground will collapse, but where the next fault will be located. This physical agony has already condemned the local economy.”
“The kibbutz of Ein Gedi, once an oasis renowned for its thermalism, now resembles wasteland territory. Its date palm plantations have now been abandoned one after another. The soil having become too unstable to support the passage of agricultural machinery. More than 10 hectares of once luxurious crops are today forbidden zones surrounded by barbed wiring and danger signs.”
“The Ein Gedi Spa is the most direct symbol of this disruption. The building designed to be on the water’s edge now stands in the middle of a plane of salt. To allow tourists to finally reach the sea, the management had to set up a small train pulled by a tractor. It’s a journey of nearly 10 minutes through a landscape of desolation to reach water that keeps moving farther away.”
“By the end of 2017, financial losses for this single community exceeded $30 million. What we’re observing here is not a slow erosion. It’s the real-time collapse of a world that can no longer conceal the scars of human intervention. But the shoreline is not the only thing collapsing. 80 km from here, it is the entire social structure of Amman that threatens to break under the weight of a demography that water can no longer sustain.”
“The Jordanian capital illustrates the absolute urgency of the Middle East. In the 1960s, Jordan had 900,000 inhabitants. Today, there are nearly 10 million. This demographic explosion, intensified by the arrival of 1 million Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war, has caused the country’s water needs to jump by 22% in just a few years.”
“In this economy of scarcity, shortage seeps into the intimacy of households. To preserve reserves, the Jordanian government now cuts running water several days per week. Faced with this situation, an unprecedented response is emerging. Women are training in plumbing. This choice, which sometimes sparked irony within families, responds to a precise cultural constraint.”
“In Jordan, many Muslim women are not allowed to remain alone at home with a male technician who does not belong to the family. This social blockage delays repairs and leads to the loss of billions of liters of water because of aging pipelines. By taking up this profession, these women became the direct actors in safeguarding a resource that can no longer be wasted.”
“But saving is no longer enough. With demand continuously rising in Jordan and in the Palestinian territories, water has become the central theme and paradoxically the most pragmatic one of the regional conflict. If it’s an obvious source of tension, it also remains one of the rare fields where the parties continue to communicate despite their differences.”
“Faced with the decline of this level, the idea of stabilizing the basin through an external supply is not new. It takes root as early as 1855 in the writings of the British author William Allen. In his work, The Dead Sea, a new route to India, he envisioned a canal linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea via the Dead Sea as a strategic alternative to the Suez Canal.”
“If this vision remained theoretical for a time, it became a concrete subject of study after the 1973 oil crisis. Seeking to secure its energy independence, Israel commissioned an initial feasibility study in 1975 from the German engineers Vent and Kelma. They proposed an aqueduct linking the Mediterranean Sea from the city of Ashdod to the Dead Sea.”
“The objective was to take advantage of the depression located 430 m below sea level, allowing the water to flow naturally by gravity alone. This significant elevation difference would have made it possible to generate abundant electricity intended to power vast desalination plants. But in the early 2000s, priorities shifted.”
“The urgency was no longer energy, but water scarcity. The route was therefore moved south to connect the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. Renamed the Peace Canal, this new project aims to convert seawater into fresh water of sufficient quality for human consumption through desalination while also creating agricultural opportunities and attempting to stabilize the lake’s critically declining water level.”
“The file officially became diplomatic at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg in 2002. It was on this occasion that Israel and Jordan jointly presented the project. While French President Jacques Chirac formulated his reminder about climate urgency, ‘Our house is burning and we are looking urgently.’ A cry of alarm that still retains its full meaning two decades later.”
“In 2005, the RSDSC Red Sea Dead Sea Conveyance Study Program was initiated. Estimated at its launch at $10 billion. This plan provided for a 180 km connection from the Gulf of Aqaba. In 2009, the World Bank financed a $16 million feasibility study entrusted to the French firm Coyne et Bellier to arbitrate between an open canal and an underground pipeline.”
“On paper, the RSDSC is massive. It provides for the annual transfer of 2,000 million m cubed of water. 1,200 million would be discharged into the sea while the remaining 800 million would supply a desalination plant. In 2013, a tripartite agreement between Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority finally retained the project of an aqueduct located on Jordanian territory.”
“This plan revised downward targets the pumping of 300 million m cubed to produce drinking water in the Aqaba and transfer the residual brines northward. The technical implementation relies on Israeli expertise in desalination. The process uses multi-layer filtration to separate salt from water molecules. Sea water is conveyed by pumps to large basins where it passes through a layer of sand.”
“Large objects such as algae and some fish remain blocked at this stage. The water is then propelled through advanced membranes that allow the smallest water molecules to pass but not larger ones such as salt. Finally, fresh water takes Israel’s national water carrier while the brines from desalination are discharged into the sea. The routes must however cross major obstacles.”
“200 km of desert, mountainous areas, and above all 275 seismic faults. To limit the risks of sabotage and evaporation, the 5 m diameter pipeline is designed to be buried. However, the proximity of underground freshwater aquifers poses a risk of saline contamination in case of a leakage or rupture of the pipeline. Beyond engineering, scientific uncertainties regarding the mixing of waters remain.”
“At Ben-Gurion University, simulations show that the addition of Red Sea brine could alter the appearance of the Dead Sea through two reactions. On the one hand, whitening; the encounter between calcium from the Dead Sea and sulfate from the Red Sea creates gypsum, calcium sulfate capable of transforming the turquoise water into a milky layer.”
“On the other hand, red coloration. If salinity drops below the critical threshold of 25%, the environment becomes favorable to the proliferation of unicellular algae. This phenomenon is already visible in the Great Salt Lake in Utah, Lake Retba in Senegal, or Lake Eyre in Australia. Despite these studies, the project has collided with political and financial reality.”
“The military escalation in the region and the breakdown of diplomatic dialogue over the past 2 years have suspended cooperation agreements. On June 15th, 2021, the Jordanian Minister of Irrigation, Muhammad al-Najjar, formalized the abandonment of the tripartite project, favoring the country’s immediate drinking water needs.”
“Jordan has therefore chosen to launch its own national program, the National Conveyor Project, and to build alone its desalination plant in Aqaba without depending on cooperation that has become impossible. In 2024, this project completed its feasibility studies and environmental impact assessments. In January 2025, Jordan reached a historic milestone by signing an initial agreement with the consortium Meridium-Suez, marking the official launch of construction, which began this year.”
“Financing and construction are now progressing with the solid support of the European Union and the European Investment Bank. In this context, saving the Dead Sea has moved to the background of state priorities. As each nation focuses on its water security, no mechanism is any longer in place to address the overall siphoning of the basin.”
“The lowest point in the world continues to pay the price of fragmented management, where immediate survival imperatives outweigh the preservation of a millennial ecosystem. If engineering seems ready today, it still faces a reality that no plan can fully control. The deep instability of the ground. To understand the vulnerability of the future canal, we must read the archives written in the cliffs surrounding the lake.”
“For 220,000 years, sediments have accumulated there like a geological memory. Looking closely at the rock, one can distinguish an alternation of dark and light layers, recording winter floods and summer evaporations. This perfect stacking is sometimes broken by chaotic structures, the signature of major earthquakes. From the walls of Jericho to the disaster of 1927, the region has always been an active seismic zone.”
“For geologists, rooting a pipeline along the fault is an immediate risk. A rupture would release millions of cubic meters of brine into underground freshwater aquifers, making these agricultural reserves permanently unstable. At the other end of the project, another sanctuary imposes its limits, the Gulf of Aqaba.”
“The Red Sea here hosts one of the planet’s most resilient coral reefs, capable of resisting warming waters that kill corals everywhere else. But this survival is fragile. Scientists fear that the desalination plant could suck in coral larvae, fish, and mollusks essential for reef regeneration. To preserve this microscopic life, water must be pumped at over 120 m depth below the photosynthesis zone.”
“A colossal technical and financial extra cost, but necessary to avoid sacrificing one natural wonder for another. Yet despite these risks, the Dead Sea hides untapped potentials that could fund its own salvation. The first is energy. The 400 m drop between the global sea level and this depression could generate massive hydroelectric power.”
“Like Egypt’s Qattara project, this clean energy could supply the desalination plants, creating a self-sufficient system capable of transforming a geological wound into a giant battery. The real game-changer could however come from beneath the surface. The ultra concentrated waters of the lake contain dissolved lithium deposits, the so-called white petroleum essential for the global energy transition.”
“Thanks to the new direct lithium extraction technologies, DLE, the Dead Sea could become a strategic supplier of batteries, generating revenues sufficient to cover the full cost of restoring the basin. It would then go from ecological burden to strategic reservoir. Stabilizing the sea also means protecting a priceless global heritage.”
“By stopping shoreline collapse and the scourge of sinkholes, the region could rebuild sustainable thermal tourism and safeguard its historical sites. From the Masada Fortress to the Qumran caves, guardians of the Dead Sea Scrolls. By diverting the Jordan River to build cities and fertilize deserts, we’ve broken a millennia-old balance.”
“Today, trying to revive this sea with pipelines, desalination plants, and billions of dollars may be nothing more than the mirage of a sea that no one really wants to save. This is the end of this report. If you enjoyed this geography story, I invite you to discover the first episode of our series dedicated to water. Don’t forget to subscribe to follow me and leave your thoughts about the project in the comments. See you very soon and looking for.”
