(Ein Gedi) In Israel, during the heyday of the Ein Gedi spa in the 1960s, vacationers could lounge by heated pools and then slip into the Dead Sea. A distant memory, the salty waters having since receded to give way to strange craters.
The Dead Sea, a spectacular expanse of water in the middle of the desert between Israel, the occupied West Bank and Jordan, flanked by sheer cliffs to its west and east, has lost a third of its surface since 1960.
The blue waters recede by about a meter each year, leaving behind a lunar landscape, a land whitened by salt and perforated with gaping holes.
“One day or another, if there is a trickle of water to soak your foot, we’ll be lucky,” laments Alison Ron, a resident of Ein Gedi, who has worked for the spa for a long time. “There will only be sinkholes.”
Craters can form in a fraction of a second and exceed ten meters in depth, the sinkholes have multiplied over the past twenty years on the shores of the lake.
As it recedes, the salt water leaves behind underground salt patches. When it rains, fresh water seeps into the soil and dissolves the salt patches. Without support, the land above can then collapse and form sinkholes.
Ghost town
In Ein Gedi, the three kilometers of rocky sand that separate the spa from the shore are now dotted with holes and crevices.
A few kilometers further north, a whole tourist complex has turned into a ghost town, disfigured by craters and enclosed in fences. The pavement is gutted, the lampposts overturned, the date plantation abandoned and the millions of shekels invested, gone.
According to Ittai Gavrieli, a researcher at the Israel Geological Institute, there are now thousands of sinkholes on either side of the Dead Sea.
These “dangerous” craters, but also “unique and magnificent”, are the direct consequence of the drying up of the lake from the 1970s, under the combined effect of the deviation of the Jordan River which flows into it and of the increasing extraction of minerals.
Today, the Dead Sea receives only 10% of the flow of the past, diverted by Israel and Jordan for their agricultural and drinking water needs.
In addition, evaporation is favored by the warming of the region, which recorded a national heat record in July, with 49.9 degrees Celsius in Sodom, southwest of the Dead Sea.
For Gidon Bromberg, Israeli director of the NGO Ecopeace, the sinkholes are “nature’s revenge” in reaction to “inappropriate human actions”. “We will not be able to bring the Dead Sea back to its heyday, but we ask that its level be at least stabilized,” pleads Mr. Bromberg.
Inescapable decline
His organization, made up of Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli scientists, advocates increasing desalination in the Mediterranean Sea to relieve pressure on Lake Tiberias and the Jordan River, which could flow back to the Dead Sea.
She would also like the industry to be “held accountable” by paying more taxes.
Asked by AFP, the Jordanian Ministry of Water did not detail the solutions that could save the sea, but believes that it is necessary “to attract the attention of the world to find reasonable solutions”.
In June, Jordan, one of the most water-deficit countries, abandoned the idea of a canal from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, which was to be conducted with Israel and the Palestinians. Amman preferred the construction of a desalination plant to increase its supply of drinking water.
But even if the canal had been built, it could not have saved the lake on its own, notes Eran Halfi, hydrologist at the Arava Scientific Institute.
“The Dead Sea has a deficit of one billion cubic meters per year and the canal would have brought 200 million cubic meters”, he explains.
So is the Dead Sea doomed to evaporate? Scientists say its decline is inevitable for at least the next hundred years, and sinkholes will continue to expand.
But the lake could then reach equilibrium, because as its surface decreases, the water becomes saltier and evaporation decelerates.
In Ein Gedi, Alison Ron does not care that in more than a century “his” sea, amputated, may find a balance, because by diverting rivers and building factories, “Man has interfered ”with nature, she says. “We should be ashamed of having let this happen.”