One body of water is losing a meter annually—sinkholes now open weekly

The Vanishing Sea

The Dead Sea sits 1,410 feet below sea level, the lowest point on Earth's land surface, cradled between Jordan to the east and Israel and the West Bank to the west. For millennia it has been a geological marvel: water so dense with salt—nearly ten times saltier than the ocean—that bathers float effortlessly on its surface. Yet since the 1960s, the sea has been disappearing at an accelerating pace, dropping roughly three feet per year. The shoreline has retreated more than a mile in some places, leaving behind a moonscape of cracked salt flats, rusted buoys stranded on dry land, and luxury hotels that once sat waterside now a twenty-minute walk from the surf. The sea has lost more than a third of its surface area, shrinking from about 390 square miles in 1960 to under 240 square miles today. The water level continues to fall, and scientists warn that without intervention, the Dead Sea could fragment into isolated brine pools within decades.

What is killing the Dead Sea is not climate change alone but a more direct human hand: the diversion of the Jordan River. The river once delivered more than 320 billion gallons of freshwater annually into the Dead Sea's northern basin, sustaining a delicate equilibrium between inflow and evaporation in one of the hottest, driest places on the planet. But starting in the 1960s, Israel, Jordan, and Syria began siphoning the Jordan's water for agriculture and drinking, building dams and canals that redirect the flow before it ever reaches the sea. Today the river delivers less than 10 percent of its historic volume—often little more than a saline trickle of agricultural runoff. Compounding the problem are massive evaporation ponds operated by Israeli and Jordanian mineral companies on the sea's southern basin, which extract potash, bromine, and magnesium from the brine. These ponds accelerate water loss, turning liquid into white salt crust and chemical profit. The southern basin, in fact, no longer exists as a natural body of water; it has been carved into industrial evaporation pools, separated from the northern sea by a land bridge that emerged as the water fell.

The Sinkhole Epidemic

As the Dead Sea retreats, it leaves behind a subsurface catastrophe. Beneath the shoreline lies a thick layer of salt deposited over thousands of years, and as the hypersaline water recedes, fresher groundwater seeps in to replace it. That freshwater dissolves the underground salt, carving out hidden cavities in the rock. When the roof of a cavity collapses, the ground above gives way, sometimes in seconds, creating sinkholes that range from a few feet across to craters more than eighty feet wide and sixty feet deep. The first sinkholes appeared in the late 1980s near the resort town of Ein Gedi on the Israeli shore. By 1990, there were fewer than fifty. Today, more than 6,000 sinkholes pock the landscape, and new ones open weekly. Some appear overnight in parking lots, hiking trails, and agricultural fields; others swallow roads, date palm groves, and sections of beach. In 2015, a sinkhole opened beneath a major highway, forcing its closure. In 2021, a lifeguard station collapsed into the earth. There is no way to predict where the next one will form, because the salt dissolution happens out of sight, and geologists have mapped only a fraction of the unstable ground. Entire stretches of the Dead Sea's western shore are now closed to the public, marked by warning signs and chain-link fences.

The sinkholes have gutted the region's economy. Ein Gedi, once a thriving tourist destination with a public beach and campground, has been largely abandoned, its facilities shuttered as sinkholes encroached. A cluster of sinkholes forced the closure of Route 90, the main north-south highway along the Israeli shore, requiring a costly reroute. Potash mining infrastructure has been repeatedly damaged, and farmers have lost irrigation lines and equipment to sudden collapses. On the Jordanian side, resorts and spa hotels have seen their beaches vanish, replaced by sinkholes and cracked mud. The sinkholes are not just a geological curiosity—they are an economic and safety disaster, a daily reminder that the ground itself is unstable. Scientists from the Geological Survey of Israel and German Research Centre for Geosciences have used ground-penetrating radar, satellite imaging, and electrical resistivity surveys to map sinkhole-prone zones, but the dissolving salt moves faster than the monitoring can keep up. The Dead Sea region is collapsing from below, and no amount of fencing can stop it.

What Happens Next

For years, engineers and governments have floated grand schemes to save the Dead Sea, most notably the Red Sea–Dead Sea Conduit, a proposed pipeline that would pump seawater from the Gulf of Aqaba, desalinate it for drinking water, and channel the brine into the Dead Sea to stabilize its level. Jordan and Israel signed agreements in 2013 and began pilot projects, but the full conduit remains unbuilt, stalled by cost—estimated at over $10 billion—and environmental concerns about mixing Red Sea water with the Dead Sea's unique chemistry. Critics warn that the influx of different salts could turn the water milky or trigger gypsum blooms, destroying the sea's clarity and tourism appeal. Smaller proposals include rehabilitating the Jordan River by releasing more water from the Sea of Galilee, but that would require Israel and Jordan to sacrifice water they now use for farms and cities, a politically unpalatable trade. In the meantime, the Dead Sea continues to fall. The sinkholes multiply. And the world watches one of Earth's most storied landscapes vanish, a slow-motion catastrophe unfolding at the planet's lowest point.