Why the Dead Sea is dying
Pastor Dale Morgan
Why the Dead Sea is dying*
Stephen Farrell, Ein Gedi
# Irrigation has lowered water level
# Rescue plan 'will make things worse'
From dust it came, and to dust it is returning.
In what used to be a busy Israeli campsite, the road ends with a jagged
scar of tarmac, disappearing into a 20ft crater. Cracks tear the earth
and new holes appear underfoot without warning, dragging an abandoned
hotel into the crumbling soil.
Only a minute’s walk from the fast-receding coastline of the Dead Sea is
the starkest evidence of what environmentalists have feared for years.
Decades of a policy to drain water from the Sea of Galilee and Jordan
River to turn the deserts green have inflicted a heavy cost — the
shrinking of the Dead Sea, and the alarming appearance of fissures and
sinkholes on its shores.
Faced with an ecological disaster and driven by an insatiable thirst for
water in the Middle East, officials from Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian
Authority and the World Bank will gather beside the lowest-lying body of
water on Earth tomorrow to launch a feasibility study aimed at saving
the rapidly disappearing biblical waters.
The officials hope that the two-year feasibility study and environmental
and social assessment will recommend a multibillion-dollar project to
link the Dead Sea with the Red Sea, which lies 200km (125 miles) to the
south, using a pipeline or canal to suck 1,900 million cubic metres (2.1
million cubic yards) of water annually from the Gulf of Aqaba.
However, many people — including environmentalists and Israeli
scientists living in the worst-affected areas — say that it is a costly
extravaganza that fails to address the root cause and could ruin the
very sea that they are trying to save.
Eli Raz, an Israeli geologist, said that pumping lighter seawater into
the Dead Sea could kill its delicate micro- organisms and harm its
appeal for tourists, who float in its mineral-rich waters.
Running from Eilat and Aqaba to the Plain of Sodom, the “Red-Dead”
conduit would include a desalination facility to provide 850 million
cubic metres of water a year, and an electricity plant to generate 550
megawatts.
The proposal also envisages a shared cross-border airport and industrial
area and artificial lakes in the Wadi Araba to promote tourism.
The project is backed by Israel, which hopes to seal its decade-old
peace with Jordan, a country with an urgent need for desalinated water.
Shimon Peres, the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister, who is charged with
developing the Negev and Galilee regions, envisages the money being
raised privately. “The project of the canal, or the Peace Conduit . . .
is vital for the preservation of the Dead Sea, but just as much for
peace and prosperity in this area,” he said. “In the Middle East we have
used too much diplomacy and strategy, and too little economy.”
Thafer Alem, the Jordanian Water and Irrigation Minister, is equally
enthusiastic. “The Dead Sea is an international possession whose
diminishing will be a loss not only for Jordan, the Palestinian
Authority and Israel but for the whole world,” he said.
Yet at Ein Gedi, a kibbutz that lives off the 1.25 million visitors
drawn annually by the health spas, mud treatments and holiday beaches at
the Dead Sea, the local council says that the organisers have not heeded
warnings from its own experts that the project is too little and too
expensive.
Dov Litvinoff, the Mayor of Tamar regional council, walks cautiously
through the now-abandoned campsite, pointing to an 80ft sinkhole in the
earth caused, his experts believe, by the erosion of salt layers
underground as the Dead Sea recedes.
He warns that any “Red-Dead” channel from the south must be supplemented
from the north by using cheaper desalination projects on the
Mediterranean to restore the flow of the Jordan River. It has become a
trickle of sewage and saltwater because every drop of fresh water has
been diverted from its source at the Sea of Galilee.
“The problem is man-made. Every day we see we are facing a geological
catastrophe,” said Mr Litvinoff. “The ‘Red-Dead’ will change the Dead
Sea. Restoring the water through the Jordan is the natural way.”
Politics, inevitably, rears its head. One Palestinian official said that
although the Palestinian Authority was not adequately represented at the
outset of the project, it was now. It had been reassured by a condition
that the channel could proceed only with the consent of all parties, and
that no agreement would prejudice Palestinian rights in final
negotiations with Israel.
However, the principal concerns of the critics are ecological. “We see
the politics of a ribbon ceremony, driven by the economic interests of
Israeli and Jordanian construction companies, as the major reasons for
this project,” said Gidon Bromberg, of Friends of the Earth Middle East.
“But the drying up of the Dead Sea is due to the demise of the River
Jordan. This project is looking at a quick technological solution and
refuses to address the root cause of the problem.”
Channelling
# The Red Sea was the site of one of the world’s oldest canals, built by
Darius I between 520 and 510BC. It flowed from the Nile to modern
Ismailia, also the terminus of the Suez canal
# The White Sea-Baltic canal opened in 1933 as a centrepiece of the
first Soviet Five Year Plan and cost 25,000 lives. Is little used due to
shallow depth
Sources: PBS, Historyworld, ‘Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar’ by Simon
Sebag Montefiore