The Dead Sea shrinks, leaving behind some unique craters | PHOTOS

Gone are the days when people could relax by the heated pools at the Ein Gedi spa in Israel and then take a bath in the Dead Sea. Today, the salty water has receded, leaving behind strange craters.

The mar Dead, a spectacular body of water in the middle of the desert between Israel, the occupied West Bank and Jordan, bordered on its western part by steep cliffs, has lost a third of its surface since the 1960s.

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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 of these, we will be lucky if there is a trickle of water left to soak our feet”saddened Alison Ron, a longtime 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 kilometers to the north, a tourist complex has turned into a ghost town, disfigured by the craters And half sunk in the cracks The road is busted and the streetlights are on the ground.

According to Ittai Gavrieli, a researcher at the Israel Geological Institute, there are already thousands of sinkholes on both sides of the mar Dead.

Some craters “dangerous”By that “Unique and magnificent”, A direct consequence of the desiccation of the lake from the 1970s, due to the transfer of the Jordan River and the increasing extraction of minerals.

Today the mar Dead It only receives 10% of the flow that came to it in the past. In addition, global warming also favors the evaporation of its waters. The region registered a national heat record in July, with 49.9ºC in Sodom, southwest of the mar Dead.

For Gidon Bromberg, director of the NGO Ecopeace in Israel, the sinkholes are a “revenge of nature” for the “inappropriate actions of the human being”. “We will not be able to return the mar Dead to its golden age, but we ask that, at least, its level stabilizes, “said Bromberg.

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 me to “Hold accountable” industry 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 attention of the world 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.

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Deshawn