KALIA BEACH (Dead Sea): Twelve years ago swimmers used to plunge into nearly 10 metres of water from a diving platform jutting out in the Dead Sea off Kalia beach. Now, its metal support columns and flat top rear like some surreal modern sculpture straight from mud topped by a thin slick of the inland lake’s famously saline waters.

The Dead Sea is shrinking fast — disappearing at the astonishing rate of one metre a year, according to a recently published official report.

“We built this as a jetty and diving board for the tourists at the end of the first Gulf war in 1991,” says Amir Dover, the beach’s manager. “It was designed to help people avoid walking over the rocks in the shallows. Then it was about a half metre out of the water. Now look where it is. You’d do yourself a serious injury if you tried to use it.”

In November, after 10 years of research, the Israeli government published the initial findings of a report on the Dead Sea demonstrating the alarming contraction of the lowest and most salty body of water on the planet. “Why the experts needed a decade to tell us that, I don’t know,” said Dover, pointing to the jetty. “They just needed to come here to see how fast the water is receding. Youngsters were jumping off the jetty a few years ago but now it’s useless.”

Kalia beach, on the Dead Sea’s northern shoreline, has been empty of tourists since the violence of the intifada erupted in the region three years ago. Sunseekers, backpackers and those hoping the Dead Sea’s mineral-rich waters will alleviate skin conditions such as eczema and psoriasis have all been frightened off.

But in the long run, the lake’s falling level may prove a far graver threat to the dozens of tourist sites along the shore.

According to the report, released without a fanfare by Israel’s environment ministry, the Dead Sea will sink by more than 100 metres over the next century. Salt concentrations, already 10 times greater than the conventional sea and allowing bathers to float almost on top of the water, will rise sharply.

The Dead Sea is some 300 metres deep at its centre, so it will not disappear entirely, says the report. Instead, the shoreline will creep inwards leaving salinity concentrations so high that it will eventually be just a thick soup of salt in the centre of the Jordan Valley.

The scientists say that already several salt-tolerant bacteria, one of the few life forms that can exist in such extreme conditions, have died out.

Environmentalists, such as Gidon Bromberg of Middle East Friends of the Earth, have little doubt where the problem originates. “Israel and Jordan have been over-extracting water from the main river supplying the Dead Sea for years and now we are paying a heavy price,” says Mr Bromberg

The Dead Sea, lying about 400 metres below sea level and separating Israel and Jordan, is fed mainly by the freshwater Jordan River. The Sea’s high salt content derives from constant evaporation due to the scorching temperatures in the Jordan Valley. For millions of years, fresh water entering the Dead Sea was balanced by the loss to evaporation, keeping the sea level steady. But over the past few decades the situation has changed, with both Israel and Jordan fighting to extract as much water as possible from the Jordan for farming, domestic and industrial use.

According to environmentalists only a tenth of the river’s waters now reach the Sea, throwing the natural balance out of kilter. They criticize both countries for wasting water: hugely subisidized water prices to Israeli farmers, for example, mean that thirsty plants like melons are widely grown. “In reality, if water was properly priced, it would just be uneconomic for us to grow melons here,” said Bromberg.

Although Israel is officially admitting the problem of the Dead Sea’s falling water levels only now, the two countries have been searching for a solution since the 1980s. One proposal, on which both have pinned a great deal of hope, involves “topping up” the Sea by pumping water either from the Red Sea via Jordan or from the Mediterranean via Israel: the Red-Dead and Med-Dead options, as they have come to be known. But the cost of such a huge engineering feat has caused the plan to be repeatedly shelved.

Jordan is pushing hard for the pipeline to be built from the Red Sea, via Aqaba, and has wooed to the World Bank into underwriting a feasibility study, according to Bromberg. It hopes to siphon off some of the water to desalination plants to supply its thirsty populations in cities like Amman.

The Israeli report backs the Jordan option, though it admits that even if work began tomorrow it would take at least 20 years for the pipeline to reach the Dead Sea.

“What concerns us is that everyone seems to be agreed on the Red-Dead solution as the ‘only’ solution. Other options, like reducing extraction from the Jordan River, are just not being considered,” said Mr Bromberg. “The environmental effects of building a giant pipeline carrying sea water over the mountain ranges of the East Bank have just not been calculated.”

Etai Gavrielli, a researcher with the Israeli Geological Survey Unit, which worked on the government report, admits that there could be other problems, too. “The biggest would be the unforeseen effect of mixing sea water with the Dead Sea, which has a unique composition. We just don’t know what that will do to the lake, biologically or chemically. It may make things even worse than they are now.”

The rapidly falling sea level is having a severe impact on a unique natural habitat, including rare wildlife and vegetation concentrated around the shoreline. But the advancing problem is beginning to endanger local populations, too, as changes in pressure caused by the falling water cause large ‘sink holes’ to open up unexpectedly around the lake.

Professor Zvi Ben-Avraham, of the Dead Sea Research Centre at Tel Aviv University, forecasts that this phenomenon will grow worse in the coming years. “We think many more sink holes will start appearing in a much more extreme form posing a severe danger to local communities. It’s a future I try not to think about too much.”

Mr Bromberg believes that the Israeli government is secretly concerned that one of the many hotels around the Dead Sea could one day disappear into a sink hole, causing many deaths and incalculable damage to the lake’s tourism industry. —Dawn/The Observer News Service.