Failure™ Magazine

Dead Sea Dying a Slow Death

The famously buoyant lake is drying up. Can it be resurrected?

Written by Vince Beiser   Filed under Science & Technology

Fathi Huweimel leans carefully over the edge of a jagged slab of broken asphalt, peering down into a 60-foot-deep crater that was level ground just a day earlier. All around him sprawl the ruins of Ghawr al Hadithah, once a farming village but now a jigsaw of broken houses, shattered roads and abandoned tomato fields growing wild amid massive holes pocking the earth. To the east, the village gives way to desert fringed by stark, sere mountains. To the west, a few hundred yards away: the glimmering waters of the Dead Sea.

“We’ve had about 75 holes open up in the last two years,” says Huweimel, a thickset man with a broad mouth and deep brown eyes who has lived all of his 45 years in this part of central Jordan. The sinkholes first started appearing in the 1980s, but the pace at which new ones open up has increased dramatically in recent years. “Everyone is leaving,” continues Huweimel, who works as a field researcher with environmental group Friends of the Earth-Middle East (FoEME). “Those who stay are staying because they have no choice.”

Miraculously, no one has been killed by a cave-in yet, though there have been some close calls. A group of seven women—including Huweimel’s aunt—were harvesting tomatoes together one day when the ground collapsed with a roar two meters in front of them. A salt factory that employed a hundred people was evacuated before it caved in.

The cause of all this destruction is water—or, rather, lack of it. The ground is collapsing into sinkholes because the water beneath it is retreating. The water is retreating because the Dead Sea, a storied feature of the landscape since biblical times, is drying up.

The sea—actually a huge lake straddling the Israeli-Jordanian border at the lowest point on Earth, 420 meters below sea level—has been fed for millennia by the Jordan River. But today, so much water is siphoned out of the Jordan to meet the needs of farms and cities that practically nothing is left to replenish the Dead Sea.

Over the past three decades, the sea’s level has fallen by some 25 meters and continues to drop by an average of a meter a year. Its surface area is dwindling apace; the shore has retreated as much as a mile. It’s a severe blow to the hotels and spas dotting what used to be the sea’s beaches. Moreover, as the water retreats, it destabilizes the ground, spawning the sinkholes that have devoured Ghawr al Hadithah.

It’s an extraordinary problem that has generated an extraordinary response. The governments of the three peoples that live along the Jordan River and the Dead Sea—the Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians—are working together to promote a potential solution: a conduit to bring ocean water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. It’s being touted as a triple win: The water would replenish the Dead Sea, and in the process generate hydroelectric power, which would in turn run desalination plants to make potable water for the region. As a not-inconsiderable political bonus, it would constitute the first major project ever undertaken by all three nations.

There’s just one problem. The conduit might make things worse.

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