EIN GEDI, Israel, 30 September 2003— It has shimmered and steamed at the lowest point on Earth since time immemorial. Its silence, seclusion and healing powers have lured people from ancient mystics to modern eco-tourists.
But the Dead Sea has been quietly dying for years.
And the two states abutting its shrinking shoreline, Israel and Jordan, face formidable economic and ecological challenges in pondering how to save a unique natural wonder of the world.
They have begun to consider a “Red-Dead” solution — a canal to pump water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. But huge costs, and the risk both of damaging the Red’s famed coral reefs and diluting the Dead’s medicinal minerals, stand in the way.
Known as the Dead Sea because nothing can live in it, the world’s saltiest body of water has fallen from 390 meters (1,280 feet) to 417 meters (1,368 feet) below sea level in the last 50 years.
The drop has accelerated to a meter a year recently, erasing a third of its ancient 950 square km (366 square mile) size.
Modern economics are to blame — diversions to rain-starved farmland of Jordan River waters that feed the Dead Sea, and evaporation hastened by potash-mining in its southern basin.
Hotels and health spas built along the beach below spectacular rose- and orange-hued desert cliffs, as well as sites holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims, are now stranded a kilometer or more from the water’s edge.
Retired Swiss couple Jean and Esther Haensenberger have been spending their annual “Kur” — a Central European tradition of taking medicinal baths to treat skin ailments and stress — at Israel’s flagship Dead Sea resort of Ein Gedi since the 1980s.
At first, they could walk a few paces from the Ein Gedi Spa complex to the beach for a float in windless waters so buoyant that one can read a book while lying on one’s back.
Now visitors board a tractor-drawn trolley that shuttles them a kilometer to the water, avoiding a trudge across mudflats in sauna-like heat typifying the inland sea’s micro-climate. “It’s over twice the distance out today. It’s sad that another rare preserve of nature is vanishing,” said Jean Haensenberger as he and his wife rode to the shore. “If the sea keeps going down, will people like us keep coming?”
The number of foreign tourists in Israel has dropped because of a three-year-old Palestinian revolt. And tourism in Jordan has suffered from war and postwar turmoil in nearby Iraq.
Now the Dead Sea’s retreat is worsening the economic fallout of Palestinian violence along the western shore by spawning subsidence — more than 1,000 “sinkholes” up to 20 meters deep and 25 meters (82 feet) across.
Caused by a dissolution of salt strata in underground fresh water replacing departed salt water, sinkholes have swallowed up groves of date palms, shut down Ein Gedi’s tourist campsite and a nearby army base and scuttled a 5,000-room hotel project nearby.
“We closed the campsite after the earth trembled and the road to the site suddenly caved in right behind a passing bus full of Danish tourists,” said Eli Rav, a regional geologist and environmental consultant, pointing at a crater in the asphalt.
A camp staffer and a worker at Ein Gedi’s nearby palm plantation were sucked into collapsing sinkholes and injured.
Sinkholes appearing on the Jordanian shore have forced the evacuation of more than 3,000 people. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of hotel-spa complexes in the planning could be at risk.
“We fear that by 2050 there will be just a small spot of water that will be a disaster economically and ecologically, if nothing is done,” said Zafer Alem, secretary-general of the Jordan Valley Water Authority.
“We are raising the red flag to the international community to help us save what is really a world heritage site, belonging not just to Jordan and Israel,” he told Reuters by telephone.
At the Earth Summit in Johannesburg a year ago, Israel and Jordan agreed to look into building a “Red-Dead” pipeline that would run 320 km along their rugged desert border.
Dubbed the “Peace Conduit”, the canal would be the biggest Israel-Jordanian joint venture since their 1994 peace treaty.
Israeli officials cite the importance of cooperation with former Arab enemies as one of the main reasons they favor the Red-Dead canal over an older “Med-Dead” proposal to take water from the Mediterranean Sea, which would not involve Jordan.
At a World Economic Forum meeting held on the Jordanian Dead Sea in June, Israelis and Jordanians united at a packed session to voice enthusiasm for the project. The World Bank has prepared a draft for a feasibility study. Once approved by each government, donor funding would be sought.
Studies and construction could take a decade and cost several billion dollars, part of that for desalinization plants that Jordan sees as a vital spin-off to relieve its severe shortage of drinking water. “Our main concern is that drawing off water on a large scale from the Red Sea could alter its currents and threaten its coral reefs,” said Valerie Brachnya of Israel’s Environment Ministry. The Red’s riot of tropical reef fish is a big tourist draw.
Gidon Bromberg of the environmentalist Friends of the Earth group said that stretching a salt-water pipeline through an earthquake-prone region was another worry. “If the pipeline leaked, it would contaminate fresh water aquifers. And Red Sea water could well destroy the medicinal value of the Dead Sea derived from its high salinity,” he said. “Furthermore, the Dead Sea could turn pink or white from the chemical change incurred in mixing two different kinds of water. That would be a real turn-off to visitors.”
Environmentalists are pressing Israel and Jordan to have UNESCO declare the Dead Sea a World Heritage Site or Biosphere Reserve which would curb commercial development they say has been hastening its demise.
