MENA Water Review · Visual story
The Sea That Is Leaving
The lowest place on earth falls by more than a metre a year, and the ground along its shore is collapsing into thousands of holes. Almost none of it is natural.
Water arrives, and leaves only as vapour.
The Dead Sea lies about 440 metres below sea level, the lowest natural surface on the planet’s land. It is a terminal lake: everything dissolved in the water that reaches it remains there. Each litre now contains around 348 grams of salt. Nothing lives in it except salt-tolerant microbes, which bloom after rare wet winters.
The arithmetic is simple. Water enters from the river, the rain and the springs, and leaves through evaporation alone. From the early nineteenth century, that balance held approximately, and the surface stayed between about 389 and 399 metres below sea level. The balance ceased to hold in the mid-1960s. Since then, the level has continued to fall through years of near-average rainfall.
The fall has gone from 17 cm a year to more than a metre.
A terminal lake turns everything that happens in its basin into a single number. That makes the Dead Sea an unusually clear record of change. Its surface level has been tracked since 1930, and the pattern in the measurements makes the argument more clearly than any commentary.
The acceleration owes little to any sudden shift in climate. Rainfall remained near its long-term average while the level kept falling. Each successive diversion removed another portion of the inflow, while evaporation from the remaining surface continued regardless.
Surface level in metres below Mediterranean sea level. The fall averaged about 17 centimetres a year between 1930 and 1973; it now exceeds a metre.
Israel’s National Water Carrier begins moving water from the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan’s main reservoir, to the coastal plain and the Negev.
Sinkholes begin appearing along the retreating shore, the first physical damage on land attributable to the decline.
Jordan withdraws from the Red–Dead conveyance. In mid-2026 Israel’s State Comptroller found the country still had no plan for the falling sea.
Levels are approximate, compiled from USGS, UN-ESCWA and BGR and other published records; annual figures move with rainfall, so the shape of the curve carries more weight than any single point.
The lake receives what the basin has not already spent.
The Jordan is not a large river by world standards, but it was large enough. It once delivered about 1.3 billion cubic metres a year. It now delivers on the order of a hundred million, and most of what arrives is agricultural return flow and sewage.
No party did this to the lake deliberately. Several states acted in their own interests, damming and diverting water for households and farms. Israel’s National Water Carrier, opened in 1964, draws from the Sea of Galilee. Jordan’s King Abdullah Canal, begun in 1957, draws on the Yarmouk. Syria dammed the Yarmouk upstream of both. The Dead Sea is the accounting entry at the foot of the basin, and a terminal lake makes an unusually honest auditor.
Annual inflow from the Jordan
Orders of magnitude rather than gauged figures: the historic value is the long-run average before diversion, and the present value varies with the season and the rainfall year.
One end of the lake is held up while the other falls a metre a year.
Most accounts stop with the diverted river, which explains the larger share of the loss. The remainder is industrial and is rarely set beside it. Published estimates of the industrial share range from about 23 per cent, the Israeli operator’s own figure, to 40 per cent.
Potash, bromine and magnesium are extracted by pumping lake water into shallow ponds and letting the sun evaporate it. Evaporation is not a side effect of the process; it is the process itself. Producers on the Israeli and Jordanian shores together use about 250 million cubic metres a year.
There is a further consequence that visitors find difficult to believe. About 20 million tonnes of salt settle on the floor of the largest southern pond each year. This raises the water level towards the foundations of the hotels built along it. The operator harvests the salt to keep the level safe.
Approximate apportionment of the loss
Indicative shares. Published estimates of the industrial contribution range from about 23 per cent to 40 per cent, so the two bars should be read as an order of magnitude rather than a measurement.
The sinkholes are the sea’s retreat, working through the ground.
Beneath the shore lies a thick layer of salt. Its top is 20 to 50 metres down, sealed between clay and silt. While the groundwater around it remained saturated with Dead Sea brine, the buried salt stayed stable. As the sea retreats, the brine retreats with it. Fresh groundwater from the hills to the west then flows in behind it, and fresh water dissolves salt.
Start here. The sea used to reach further inland, and the ground along the shore was soaked with salty water from it. A layer of salt lies buried 20 to 50 metres down. Salt will not dissolve into water that is already saturated with salt, so for as long as that salty water stayed in the ground, the buried layer was safe.
As the level drops, the salty water in the ground drains away after it, and fresh water moves in from the Judean hills to the west to take its place. This is the step that matters: the shore is now sitting in fresh water rather than brine.
Fresh water dissolves salt. It eats away the buried layer and leaves a hole in the ground where the salt used to be, which grows upward towards the surface.
Eventually the roof of the hole is too thin to hold. The surface collapses into it without warning, because everything that caused it happened out of sight.
Salty water, which salt cannot dissolve intoFresh water, which dissolves itThe buried salt layer
Simplified cross-section, not to scale. Step through it with the arrows.
This is why the sinkhole belt follows the old shoreline and keeps moving. Every metre the sea drops shifts the boundary between brine and fresh water a little farther back, and the process begins again on ground that was sound the year before. The sinkholes will continue for as long as the sea keeps falling.
For two decades the answer was supposed to be a canal.
The Red–Dead conveyance would have pumped seawater from Aqaba, desalinated part of it and run the residual brine some two hundred kilometres north and downhill into the Dead Sea. That would have replenished the lake and given three governments a reason to cooperate. A memorandum was signed in 2013, but Jordan withdrew in 2021.
- 1800s
The sea at its historic level
Nineteenth-century records place the lake between about 389 and 399 metres below sea level.
- 1930–73
A slow decline
The level falls by an average of about 17 centimetres a year.
- 1957
The King Abdullah Canal begins
Jordan starts drawing on the Yarmouk, the Jordan’s largest tributary. Syrian dams follow upstream.
- 1964
The National Water Carrier opens
Israel begins moving water from the Sea of Galilee to the coastal plain and the Negev, diverting flow that once reached the lower Jordan.
- 1970s–80s
The southern basin becomes industrial
As the level drops, the strait joining the shallow southern basin to the northern one runs dry. The south is given over to evaporation ponds on both shores.
- 1980s
The first sinkholes
Holes begin appearing along the retreating shore.
- 2013
Red–Dead is signed
Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority sign a memorandum at the World Bank: desalination at Aqaba, and a pipeline carrying brine north to study the effects of mixing.
- 2021
And abandoned
Jordan withdraws after years of stagnation, citing cost, delay and environmental objections, and says it will desalinate at Aqaba alone.
- 2023–26
The successor stalls
A water-for-energy declaration between Jordan and Israel has been suspended since the war in Gaza began. Jordan’s Aqaba to Amman desalination and conveyance scheme was approved for financing in March 2026.
It will not disappear, and that is not reassuring.
The Dead Sea is unlikely to dry out completely. As it shrinks, its surface area falls, so a smaller, saltier surface evaporates less. Evaporation will eventually drop to match the small inflow that still arrives, and the level will settle. How far below the present surface it will settle is uncertain; one recent assessment projects a further fall of about 33 metres by 2050 alone.
This is the accurate version, and it is worth stating plainly because the language of a dying sea creates the wrong expectation. What is taking place is the conversion of a natural lake into a smaller, saltier, industrially managed one. The cost of that conversion is being paid on the shore: in sinkholes, abandoned beach infrastructure, groundwater draining away behind the retreating brine, and the collapse of the lower Jordan as a river.
Stabilisation does not require a mega-project. It requires water. One assessment puts the volume at 300 to 400 million cubic metres a year returned to the Jordan, alongside reductions in industrial pumping. That means treating environmental flow as a legitimate allocation rather than as the residual, in a basin where every cubic metre is already claimed by several parties.
Annual inflow, against what holding the level would take
One unit throughout, in millions of cubic metres a year. The middle figure is what one assessment puts the requirement at; the lake presently receives roughly a third of it.
Images: Dead Sea salt formations © Jan Helebrant (CC0); Dead Sea and evaporation ponds © Axelspace Corporation (CC BY-SA 4.0); sinkhole near Ein Gedi © Davidi Vardi / PikiWiki Israel (CC BY 2.5). Via Wikimedia Commons.
Sources
23 references
Surface levels are approximate and compiled from several published records; annual figures move with rainfall. The apportionment of the loss between diversion and industry is indicative, since published estimates of the industrial share range from about 23 to 40 per cent.
- USGS EROS, Earthshots: Dead Sea, Israel, Jordan, West Bank, retrieved September 2026.
- Xinhua, “Dead Sea sees continued water level decline”, 26 July 2026.
- Oren, A. (2010), “The dying Dead Sea: the microbiology of an increasingly extreme environment”, journal article, doi:10.1111/j.1440-1770.2010.00435.x (abstract).
- USGS EROS, Earthshots: Industry (Dead Sea series), retrieved September 2026.
- Sauer, S.P. (1978), Recent and projected changes in Dead Sea level and effects on mineral production from the sea, U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 78-176.
- USGS EROS, Earthshots: Rates of Decline (Dead Sea series), retrieved September 2026.
- Ynetnews, “Dead Sea level keeps falling, but Israel still has no rescue plan”, 30 June 2026, on the State Comptroller’s report.
- Farhan, I. et al. (2026), “Multi-Decadal Assessment of the Surface Area and Water Levels of the Dead Sea Using Remote Sensing Data”, Water 18(13), 1537, doi:10.3390/w18131537.
- Abelson, M. et al. (2017), “Natural versus human control on subsurface salt dissolution and development of thousands of sinkholes along the Dead Sea coast”, Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, doi:10.1002/2017JF004219.
- UN-ESCWA and BGR (2013), Inventory of Shared Water Resources in Western Asia, chapter 6: Jordan River Basin.
- ICL Group, Dead Sea water level, sustainability reporting by the Israeli operator, retrieved September 2026.
- Kuttab, D., Arab News, report on the Dead Sea and the Jordan basin, 5 December 2022.
- MERIP, “Terra Infirma – Dead Sea Sinkholes – A Photo Essay”, October 2020.
- World Bank, press release on the Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian water-sharing memorandum, 9 December 2013 (archived).
- Ynetnews (i24NEWS), “Jordan scraps proposed canal linking Red Sea to Dead Sea”, 17 June 2021.
- ICL Group, Salt harvesting, sustainability reporting by the Israeli operator, retrieved September 2026.
- Vey, S. et al. (2021), “Delayed subsidence of the Dead Sea shore due to hydro-meteorological changes”, Scientific Reports, full text, 29 June 2021.
- The Weather Channel (AFP photographs), “Abandoned Tourist Resorts Swallowed by Sinkholes Caused by Shrinking Dead Sea”, 18 July 2016.
- Abelson, M., Yechieli, Y., Crouvi, O. and Baer, G. (2006), “Evolution of the Dead Sea sinkholes”, Geological Society of America volume, doi:10.1130/2006.2401(16).
- DW, “Red Sea water may not save drying Dead Sea”, 13 March 2015.
- Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Jordan: Aqaba-Amman water desalination and conveyance project, approved 25 March 2026.
- Grist, “How Israel’s war on Gaza unraveled a landmark Mideast climate deal”, 24 July 2024.
- The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “The Impact of the War in Gaza on Israel-Jordan Cooperation”, 31 January 2024.
Every figure and claim in this story rests on the references above. The stories list them here rather than marking them in the text; the country reports and hubs keep their inline markers.