The Dead Sea

The collapse is unusually easy to date. The USGS tracks the acceleration decade by decade: about 17 centimetres a year between 1930 and 1973, 79 centimetres through the 1980s, a full metre from 1994 to 2001, and roughly 1.2 metres a year from 2018. Israel's State Comptroller, in a 2025 report covered by Ynet, gave the current fall in the northern basin as about 1.15 metres a year.

The cause is upstream. The Jordan River once delivered around 1.3 billion cubic metres of fresh water to the lake each year, the USGS records; today it contributes roughly 100 million, the rest impounded for irrigation and drinking water in Israel, Jordan and Syria.

The area figures are starker than the depth figures. A 2026 remote-sensing study in the journal Water found the lake shrank by 41.8 per cent between 1971 and 2022, from roughly 934 square kilometres in 1973, and modelled a level near 471 metres below sea level by 2050 if present trends hold. The southern basin had already dried out by 1976. It will not disappear altogether: as the brine concentrates it evaporates more slowly, so the lake tends toward a new, lower equilibrium rather than a dry pan. That is cold comfort for the shoreline, which is where the damage lands.

The green and white rectangles at the southern end of the lake, unmistakable from the air, are solar evaporation ponds. Brine is pumped from the deep northern basin, spread thin in the south and left to the sun; potassium and sodium salts crystallise out and are harvested for fertiliser and industrial chemicals.

The Israeli operator, ICL, publishes its own accounting. In 2022 it pumped about 473 million cubic metres out of the northern basin and returned roughly 310 million, a net withdrawal of some 160 million a year, about 23 per cent of the basin's annual depletion, by the company's reckoning. Without it, ICL says, the lake would still be falling, but at roughly 0.85 metres a year rather than about 1.1. On the eastern shore the Arab Potash Company runs the equivalent operation, working Dead Sea salts and mud through its Numeira subsidiary.

The industry has also created a problem that costs more to fix than the ponds cost to build. Salt precipitating out of Pond 5, the pond the hotels look at, raises its floor by about 20 centimetres a year, forcing the water up with it and threatening the foundations of buildings along the western shore. The remedy agreed with the Israeli government is to dredge roughly 20 million tonnes of salt from the pond each year and pipe it back north. ICL's board approved about $280 million in 2017, covering 80 per cent of the cost against the government's 20; the first dredger began work in November 2020 and shifts about 8 million tonnes a year, with two or three needed to reach the full 20 million. The pond you float in at Ein Bokek is, in other words, an industrial asset with a maintenance budget.

The lake touches three jurisdictions. The eastern shore is Jordan. The western shore from around Ein Gedi past Masada to Sodom is Israel. The northern part of the western shore, taking in Qumran and the beaches around Kalia, lies in the West Bank, which Israel captured in 1967 and which most of the international community regards as occupied territory; the sinkholes, as the Times of Israel notes, are spread across all three. The status of the Israeli-run beaches on that northern stretch under international law is disputed, with most states and Israel taking opposite views.

On the Israeli side almost everything a visitor wants sits at the southern end. Ein Bokek is the hotel strip: about fifteen hotels along a short frontage, drawing something like 800,000 visitors a year before the pandemic, with a tourism ministry scheme announced in 2022 to add four to five thousand rooms toward Neve Zohar. The region's tourism authority states that the main beaches at Ein Bokek and Hamei Zohar are run by the regional council, with chairs, umbrellas and shade free to the public, plus showers, lockers, lifeguards and wheelchair access.

North of there the coast is thinner. Masada stands on its rock above the western shore, Qumran sits back on its marl terrace and Ein Gedi's canyons cut through the cliffs, but the shoreline itself is largely closed, unsupervised or unreachable. The Jordanian shore reads differently: a run of resort hotels, the Dead Sea Panorama complex above them and, further north, Wadi Mujib, which the Jordan Tourism Board calls the lowest nature reserve in the world, dropping from mountains 900 metres above sea level to a gorge floor 410 metres below it. Its popular Siq Trail is a summer-only wading route.

The therapeutic claims are, unusually for a spa destination, backed by clinical literature. A review of twenty-five years of continuous ultraviolet measurement at the Dead Sea, published in 2022, reports clearance of psoriasis rated excellent to complete in more than 85 per cent of patients after four weeks on the shore. The reason is the altitude: the measuring station at Neve Zohar sits about 690 metres below Beer Sheva, and the burn-causing UVB that reaches it is attenuated by roughly 7 per cent in December and close to 12 per cent in August, while the longer UVA wavelengths are barely reduced at all. Patients can therefore take long exposures with less risk of burning.

The dangers are equally documented and less publicised. A 1989 study in Annals of Emergency Medicine of 48 adults poisoned by Dead Sea water found extreme hypercalcaemia and hypermagnesaemia, arrhythmias in 29 per cent of patients and an adult mortality rate of 19 per cent; a 2012 case report in Pediatric Emergency Care describes severe electrolyte disturbance from a single accidental ingestion. Swallowing or inhaling this water is a medical emergency, not an unpleasant taste.

In practice: float on your back, never put your head under, do not shave beforehand, rinse in fresh water afterwards, and keep the brine out of your eyes. Twenty minutes at a time is plenty, and bathe only where a lifeguard is on duty.

• Float on your back; never turn face down
• Do not shave for a day or two before bathing
• Rinse in fresh water immediately afterwards
• Swallowed or inhaled brine needs medical attention
• Bathe only where a lifeguard is on duty

The best-known rescue scheme is dead. The Red Sea–Dead Sea Water Conveyance, agreed in 2013 by Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, would have desalinated seawater in Jordan and sent the leftover brine north into the lake. Jordan abandoned it in June 2021 after years of delay over financing, environmental objections and Israeli political paralysis, turning instead to a national desalination project at Aqaba.

Israel's Environmental Protection Ministry has since floated an alternative: draw seawater at Haifa Bay, pipe it across the Jezreel Valley to a desalination plant near the Sheikh Hussein bridge, and run 400 million cubic metres of brine a year south alongside 268 million cubic metres of drinking water. The ministry's timetable, reported in 2024, ran to a decade of planning, construction from 2036 and operation around 2045, at 10 to 14.5 billion shekels; and against annual evaporation losses of some 700 million cubic metres, it would slow the fall rather than reverse it.

Nothing has been decided. Israel's State Comptroller found in 2025 that eleven of twelve initiatives intended to shore up the northern basin remained incomplete, and that no fundamental government decision had been taken. The one large intervention under way is ICL's salt harvesting in Pond 5, which protects hotel foundations in the south and does nothing for the north.

The likely outcome is not a dry lake but a smaller, saltier and less accessible one, with a shoreline that keeps moving away from everything built to face it. That is the honest reason to come now: not that the Dead Sea will vanish, but that the version you can walk down to will not last.