Posted on 04/17/2006 1:48:58 PM PDT by Bubba_Leroy
The Dead Sea is dying, with the world's saltiest water body threatened by a lack of fresh water and an increasingly tense political situation, environmentalists have warned.
The bare, sun-baked landscape around the Dead Sea -- the lowest point on earth which is bordered by Israel, Jordan and the West Bank -- has since Biblical times been fed by the Jordan river's fresh water.
But that has been systematically diverted for agricultural and hydroelectric projects, while an evaporation basin for farming world-famous Dead Sea minerals has lowered the water level by one metre (three feet) a year for the past two decades.
Now, warns Gideon Bromberg of Friends of the Earth Israel, the whole area is headed for ecological disaster unless serious measures are taken.
"The ecological situation is catastrophic," Bromberg told AFP. "In 50 years, the Dead Sea has lost a third of its surface area and its water level is continuing to drop rapidly."
"For the time being nothing concrete has been undertaken," he said, adding that the Dead Sea has lost 98 percent of the fresh water it previously had from the Jordan River which today has become "a drain".
The consequences are particularly serious on the western Israeli and West Bank shores, he said.
Every year new cracks appear in the seabed, draining more waters away. Lucrative thermal spas such as those at Ein Gedi in Israel have seen the salty waters retreat two kilometres (about one and a half miles).
"We have discovered 1,650 holes and crevasses, some of them dozens of metres deep," Eli Raz, a geologist specialising in the Dead Sea, told AFP.
The holes are mainly caused by rain water coming down from surrounding mountains and dissolving salt crystals that had previously plugged access to underground caverns.
Raz said the holes are mainly in inaccessible areas and are not yet threatening infrastructure such as buildings or the roads that bring thousands of tourists to the Dead Sea every year, as they have done for millennia, to enjoy the sparse beauty of the surroundings and the health benefits of the water.
The mineral-rich water combined with the higher atmospheric pressure of the world's lowest land depression and lack of hay fever causing pollens in the air have excellent benefits.
Last July, the World Bank approved a feasibility study for a plan to build a 200-kilometre (120-mile) canal to bring water from the Red Sea to the south.
The two-year study by Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians is to cost 15.5 million dollars and will be financed by foreign donors.
If the feasibility study give the go-ahead, the project will take around five years to complete.
Its second phase involves building power generation and water desalination plants to supply electricity and fresh water to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Experts say the Dead Sea needs some two billion cubic metres (528 billion gallons) of water annually from the Red Sea because 66 billion cubic metres (17.4 trillion gallons) have evaporated through industrial use.
But since the victory of Islamist militant movement Hamas in January's Palestinian elections, Israel has cut virtually all contacts with the Palestinian Authority, further complicating the delicate situation.
Moreover, some ecologists are concerned that the canal project will cause more damage than good, upsetting the Dead Sea's delicate equilibrium by bringing salt water in to replace the depleted supply of fresh water.
Some 50 kilometres (30 miles) long by 17 kilometres wide at its broadest point, the Dead Sea's water level is 412 metres below the Mediterranean Sea and is famed as the saltiest body of water in the world, around 10 times more saline than the oceans.
Both Israel and Jordan have set up nature reserves around the Dead Sea, home to ibexes, camels, foxes and the occasional leopard.
The area is also famous for having preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves that served as libraries on the sea's northern shore for 2,000 years.
I can't for the life of me figure out what this sentence is supposed to mean. Don't wire services have editors anymore?
If they are trying to say that the Dead Sea is the lowest point on Earth, then they are wrong. I am pretty sure that distinction belongs to the Marianas Trench. The bottom of the dead sea does not even make the top ten list.
If they are saying that it is the lowest point that borders Israel, Jordan and the West Bank, well yeah, but it is a relatively short border.
So once again it is Israel's fault, not the Palestinians for electing Hamas.?
[HUGE Yawn]
Who cares?
I think they are saying that the dead sea has been fed by the Jordan River since biblical times.
Pretty sure it has been fed a lot longer than that.
The Dead Sea is below sea level. The trenches in the "Top 10" are submarine trenches.
The Dead Sea is dying.
It's already Dead, right, so WGAS?
It's DEAD, Jim.
This must be a press release from the Department of Redundancy Department.
Interesting choice of words.
Isn't this an oxymoron?
The fragile coral reefs that existed in the Permian Basin of West Texas are gone! Completely dead and now buried by about 8,000 feet of solid rock and topsoil!!
It's an ecological disaster!
And they're also a nice trap for hydrocarbons which is why we're drilling holes into them today.
The title of this thread appears to be.
They are trying (and failing) to say that the Dead Sea is the lowest point of land on the Earth: http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0001763.html
The reason is that I'm of the belief that the remains of the biblical cities of Sodom & Gomorrah are somewhere underneath the surface of the Dead Sea.
Of course, I could be waaaaaaay wrong, like usual.
Basically, pumping the water out on to evaporation plains.
Now that I think about it, the show "Worlds Dirtiest Jobs" showed a honey truck dumping its load on to a concrete
evaporation area, and a frontloader comes along the next day to dump the dried waste into a truck to take to the dump.
I thought it blindingly obvious what they meant, even though I suppose you could nitpick the word choice.
I had to read it twice to figure it out. When I saw that others were also confused, I thought I'd clarify. I maintain that it's a badly-worded sentence.
Perhaps. But the initial poster who claimed "I can't for the life of me figure out what was meant..." really couldn't see any obvious differences between the Marianas Trench and the Dead Sea?
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