<i>Dead Sea is dying in north</i>
The Dead Sea is dying, goes the conventional wisdom: The water level of the fabled salty lake is dropping nearly 1.2 metres a year. Less well known: Part of the lake is actually overflowing, threatening one of Israel's key tourism destinations.
The Dead Sea is divided into a northern and southern basin, which are located at different elevations, largely disconnected and kilometres apart. That means the rising waters of the southern basin cannot simply pour into the shrinking basin in the north.
Heavy industrialisation is what's causing the waters on the southern basin to rise. Chemical companies have built evaporation pools there to extract lucrative minerals from the lake. Millions of tonnes of salt are left annually on the floor of these pools, causing the water to rise eight inches a year.
Israel's tourism and environmental protection ministers are demanding that Dead Sea Works Ltd -- the multibillion-dollar Israeli industry that mines the mineral-rich waters -- foot the bill.
The Dead Sea, which is linked to the sites of the biblical Sodom and Gomorra, runs more than 60 miles through Israel, the West Bank and Jordan.
Current efforts to preserve the Dead Sea as a natural treasure shine a spotlight on how extensively the lake has been exploited by modern industry -- and how it paradoxically also depends on industry for its survival.
The southern basin now in danger of flooding nearly dried up before the chemical companies intervened. In the 1960s, Dead Sea Works dug a 10-mile canal to pump saltwater from the lake's northern basin into its nearly parched southern end, turning it into a network of evaporation pools.
As the water rises, it encroaches on hotel beaches, where blobs of salt stick out near the shores and the salty floor sparkles in the turquoise waters. At one beach, stairs leading to the lake have become half-submerged, and a sun umbrella permanently affixed to the edge is now deep in the water.
Environmentalists accuse Dead Sea Works of profiting at the expense of the ecology. Its factory of smokestacks, pipes and levers looms at the tip of the lake, and its tractors sit high atop snow-white piles of potash.
It's the exact opposite problem at the Dead Sea's northern basin, where the water level is dropping and a barren, pockmarked moonscape has replaced sandy beaches.
Old boardwalks that once led into the lake now stand in the middle of empty land. At one beach, bathers must ride a trolley to the lake's edge.
Israel, Jordan and Syria are responsible for the northern Dead Sea's dramatic shrinkage: They have redirected the Jordan River and its tributaries for drinking water, drastically reducing the amount that used to flow into the Dead Sea. The Israeli and Jordanian industries also pump out water from the sea for their evaporation pools.
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