Gone are the days when people could relax by the heated pools at Israel’s Ein Gedi Spa and then take a dip in the Dead Sea. Today, the salty water has receded, leaving behind strange craters. The Dead Sea, a spectacular body of water in the middle of the desert between Israel, the occupied West Bank and Jordan, bordered on its western side by steep cliffs, has lost a third of its surface since the 1960s.
Every year, its waters recede by about a meter, leaving behind a lunar landscape , a land bleached by salt and full of huge holes. “Any day now, we’ll be lucky if there is a trickle of water left to soak our feet in, ” commented sadly Alison Ron, a long-time neighbor of Ein Gedi who worked at the spa. “There will be no more than sinkholes.”
The sinkholes, craters that can form in a fraction of a second and exceed ten meters in depth , have multiplied in the last twenty years on the shores of the lake. When recoiling, the salty water leaves behind some underground salt plates. When it rains, fresh water seeps into the water and dissolves these plates, while the land above, lacking support, sinks and forms sinkholes.
“Revenge of nature”
At Ein Gedi, the three kilometers of rocky sand that separate the spa from the shore are today dotted with holes and crevices. A few miles further north, a tourist complex has turned into a ghost town, disfigured by craters and half sunk in crevices. The road is busted and the streetlights are on the ground.
According to Ittai Gavrieli, a researcher at the Geological Institute of Israel, there are already thousands of sinkholes on both sides of the Dead Sea.
Craters that are “dangerous” as well as “unique and magnificent”, a direct consequence of the drying out of the lake in the 1970s, due to the transfer of the Jordan River and the increasing extraction of minerals.
Today, the Dead Sea only receives 10% of the flow that reached it in the past. In addition, global warming favors the evaporation of its waters. The region registered a national heat record in July, with 49.9ºC in Sodom , southwest of the Dead Sea.
For Gidon Bromberg, director of the NGO Ecopeace in Israel, the sinkholes are a “revenge of nature” for the “inappropriate actions of human beings.” ” We will not be able to return the Dead Sea to its golden age , but we ask that its level at least stabilize,” Bromberg said.
His organization, made up of Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli scientists, advocates increasing the desalination of the Mediterranean to reduce pressure on the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan, which could feed the Dead Sea.
He also wants the industry to be “held accountable” and forced to pay more taxes. But is the Dead Sea doomed to evaporate? According to scientists, their decline is inevitable, at least for the next hundred years, and sinkholes will continue to appear.
The Jordanian Ministry of Water, contacted by AFP, limited itself to pointing out that it is necessary to “draw the world’s attention to find reasonable solutions.” In June, Jordan scrapped the idea of building a canal from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea , opting for the construction of a desalination plant to increase its drinking water supply.
But that channel would not have been enough to save the lake anyway, said Eran Halfi, a hydrologist at the Arava institute. “The Dead Sea has a deficit of one billion cubic meters a year , and the canal would have contributed 200 million cubic meters,” he stressed.
