Dead Sea
A hypersaline lake at the lowest point on Earth's land surface
The Dead Sea is the lowest place a person can stand on dry land anywhere on Earth — its surface lies roughly 440 metres below sea level and keeps dropping. It is also among the saltiest bodies of water on the planet, a hypersaline lake nearly ten times saltier than the ocean, so dense that bathers bob on its surface like corks and so hostile that almost nothing lives in it. Cupped in the rift valley between Israel and Jordan, with the West Bank along its northwestern shore, it has drawn healers, pilgrims, and the curious for millennia.
The lake fills the deepest part of the Jordan Rift Valley, fed by the Jordan River and a few seasonal streams, with no outlet — so the only escape for its water is evaporation under the desert sun, which concentrates dissolved salts to about 34 percent by weight. That extreme salinity makes the water buoyant, mineral-laden, and oily to the touch, and it precipitates pillars and crusts of salt along the receding shore. The lake measures only about 605 square kilometres today and reaches a maximum depth of around 304 metres, deepest of any hypersaline lake.
The shores have a long human history: Herod built a fortress nearby at Masada, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in caves at Qumran above its northwestern edge, and its mud and minerals have been prized as remedies since antiquity. Yet the lake is shrinking fast. Diversion of the Jordan's waters for farms and cities upstream has cut its inflow to a trickle, dropping its level by more than a metre a year and opening thousands of dangerous sinkholes along the drying shore. Plans to pipe in water from the Red Sea have been debated for decades.