The Dead Sea is shrinking and, as photos of the dramatic scene outside of a hotel in the Israeli resort of Eilat show, this isn’t the only body of water under consideration for a rehabilitation project.
In the pictures, the water — known for its murky and negative image — looks nearly translucent, which is due to the amount of salt that it has lost during the past decades. “The salt content in the Dead Sea has been decreasing and shows no signs of reversing course,” a 2006 study in The Bulletin of the Royal Meteorological Society noted.
Once the largest body of freshwater on Earth, the Dead Sea is shrinking by more than one meter per year. Photo
At a 2010 meeting of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the conservation group Save the Sea outlined a road map for supporting a recovery of the Dead Sea. The group, for instance, suggested halving the amount of salt in the lake by developing plant and animal species that could use the salty water. Another possible path to conservation is the creation of a nature reserve where humanity could protect the lake. While nothing has been implemented on this sort of scale, the pictures of the Dead Sea are a reminder that the world’s shrinking water bodies can elicit strong reactions.
Click here to read the full story on The Guardian.
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