The Dead Sea Is Dying

Israel - The Dead Sea - the most unique body of water in the Mideast - is drying up. Depleted by industrialization and tourist development, the sea is evaporating, sapping an environmental and cultural resource shared by Israel, Palestine and Jordan. The Dead Sea's decline threatens habitat for rare and endangered species - including Griffon vultures, lesser kestrals, black storks, 'Ein Gedi mole vipers, Blantford foxes, green toads, Egyptian mongeese, Nubian ibexes and Euro-Asian boars.

"The Dead Sea is dying," says EcoPeace [PO Box 55302, E. Jerusalem, Israel, +972 2 6260841/3, fax: -40, ecopeace@netvision.net.il], a Middle East environmental nongovernmental forum designed to promote ecologically sound development. According to a recent EcoPeace study, industrial operations, agricultural diversions and recent plans to surround the sea with highways, industries and 50,000 new hotel rooms could turn the ancient sea to sand.

Since the 1980s, the sea's depth has been decreasing an average of 65 mm (2.6 inches) per year. While the northern stretch remains in its natural state, the southern third has been cut off, diked into a quilt of solar evaporation ponds used to produce potash (potassium hydroxide), salt, bromine and magnesium metal.

EcoPeace reports that "between 25-30 percent of the total evaporation of the Dead Sea waters can be attributed to the solar ponds." Mineral extraction and processing consume vast amounts of water, and, as the sea declines in volume, the remaining waters evaporate more quickly.

Under the Geneva Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, Israel must stop production of bromide (a bromine compound) by the year 2001. But neighboring Jordan, as a developing country, has until 2011 to phase out its bromide production. To circumvent the Geneva convention, Israel recently signed a pact to move its bromide plant inside Jordan's border and extend plant operations for an additional decade.

The Dead Sea's water supply depends on the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers and their tributaries, but EcoPeace warns that a number of potential water development projects intended to serve agricultural, industrial and tourism-related demands in the sea's bordering countries could reduce riverflow to a trickle.

Meanwhile, a proposed four-lane highway and trucking route along the Dead Sea's western shores would damage its cliff face and disrupt fragile wildlife habitat. Proposed tourist developments along both shores would threaten the area's environmental integrity.

At April's Earth Summit +5 meeting in New York, EcoPeace issued a plea to the world community to help save the Dead Sea. EcoPeace's nine-point plan calls for: listing the sea as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, creating a Dead Sea International Joint Commission, developing a master plan for tourism, conducting full archaeological and ecological surveys of the region, developing a master plan for using Jordan River Basin waters, preventing highway development along the sea's shores, supporting sustainable transportation systems ("with preference given to sailboats"), halting bromine production "no later than 2001," and conducting an independent environmental audit of potash companies.

For thousands of years, people have traveled to this lowest, saltiest sea on Earth - whose quiet, deep blue waters are bound by towering mountain cliffs - in search of solitude and refuge from the desert's harsh climate. EcoPeace's message - addressed to Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians alike - is a simple one: "The Dead Sea is a single ecosystem. We risk losing it if we do not plan for it together." - GS