With water levels currently at 423 m below sea level, the Dead Sea is the deepest place on Earth.
Credit: iStockPhoto
One hundred and twenty thousand years ago (give or take a bit) the Dead Sea dried up. It was an event that occurred without any help from humans, who at the time were confined to small bands, mostly in Africa.
But if it happened then, it's easy to image how much more easily could it occur now, under the dual threats of global warming and irrigation water diversions that have already dropped the sea's water level by 28 m since 1970.
The Dead Sea is the deepest place on Earth, with water levels currently at 423 m below sea level. It lies between Israel and Jordan, where the surrounding lowlands once played a pivotal role in the 'out of Africa' migration of humans into Asia, Europe, and beyond. Not to mention its role in Biblical times, when it was fed by the River Jordan, flowing out of the Sea of Galilee to the north.
Because the Dead Sea lies at the lowest end of one of the Middle East's largest drainage basins, scientists are very interested in what they can learn by drilling into its bottom (currently 377 m below the surface). "It is the most fantastic recorder for past climate in the Middle East," Zvi Ben Avraham, head of the Minerva Dead Sea Research Centre at Tel Aviv University in Israel, said last December at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California.
The Dead Sea Drilling Project was years in the making, but finally commenced in 2010. Last November, an international team of scientists finally opened cores from the Dead Sea's depths.
Part of what they found was expected. In winter, rain waters the adjacent highlands, bringing down layers of mud. But in summer, the rains cease and the lake evaporates - not much, but enough to leave layers of calcium carbonate, interleaved between the layers of mud.
These layers have a lot in common with tree rings, when it comes to determining ancient climates. "It's an absolutely phenomenal record," said Steve Goldstein of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. "We can use them to reconstruct the climate on a seasonal basis. "In fact," he said, "we saw a new 'dark' layer being made due to a flash flood from the Mediterranean [Israeli] side of the mountains."
The scientists also found layers of salt. These represented eras in which the normal seasonal changes were overwhelmed by long-term drying, causing salt to precipitate from the shrinking waters. "The salt represents the Dead Sea declining in size," Goldstein said. But the biggest find came deep in the core, where it showed a layer of pebbles. "It appears to be a beach deposit," Goldstein said. "There is nothing else like it in the core."
Only one thing, he said, could have produced such a deposit: a sea that had evaporated to the point that the portion represented by the core was high and dry. And since the core had come from near the deepest part of the Dead Sea, the conclusion was startling: the Dead Sea had, at one time, completely dried up.
The pebbles, Goldstein added, lay at the base of about 45 m of salt deposits - about what you'd get if today's sea, which is one third salt by weight, completely dried up.
Like Sodom and Gommorah
These are "The End Days!"
End time predictions are many !
Most have come to pass, from the Jews being cast out of the holy lands around 70 A.D. to their return home in 1948. The Russians( the bear of the north) are in Syria, the weather has gone crazy, China (the king of the east)is looking long and hard at the middle East,the mad man from Iran is almost ready to A-Bomb attack Israel. It looks like we are running out of predictions.
Dead Sea
This type of article let us to believe that 2012 is the end of the world. I guess God will do something, he will definitely turn his magic stick and everything will be fine. Just keep faith on him.
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