Dead Sea faces tough times

News, September 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

Body of water already lowest place in world sinks to new lows
Warren Singh-Bartlett
Special to The Daily Star 9/27/03

Shading his eyes, Omar turns his back on the water and scans the sun-baked slopes. After a minute or so, he points to a jumble of rocks just below the sticky tarmac strip of Highway 65.
“See them? When I was a child,” says this now middle-aged resident of Amman, “I’m sure the sea used to come up to where those rocks are now. It certainly didn’t start all the way down here.”
Increasingly deprived of the fresh water that keeps it alive, the world’s saltiest body of water is drying up, its shoreline dropping at the rate of about a meter every year. In the lowest place on Earth, a dead sea may be dying.
“On the Israeli side the shrinkage is even more visible,” says Yehya Shehadeh, director of conservation at Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature. ”They have had hotels on the sea for much longer than us and the oldest ones are now a long, long way from the water.”
In 1920, water level was recorded at 392 meters below sea level. These days, it is 30 meters lower. At current rates of evaporation, some predict that by 2050, this glittering body of water may be a glittering bowl of salt.
There is much that remains unknown about the Dead Sea. Smack in the heart of the region’s most intractable conflict, access has not always been easy and accordingly, scientific research is limited.
Still, why the Dead Sea is shrinking is no mystery. Land-locked, it is dependant on the rivers (both annual and seasonal) that feed it for survival.
Many of these no longer flow. The sea is also in the middle of one of the most water-short parts of the region. Most of the seasonal rivers on the western shore have been dammed by Israeli authorities. Though less advanced, this process is being repeated in Jordan where several new dams are under construction. One of them, the Wadi Mujib project, will cork the largest source of fresh water still flowing into the Dead Sea on the Jordanian side once it is completed.
Things are even worse on the River Jordan, the sea’s main artery. Dammed at the southern end of the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan is depleted even before it reaches its valley. Israeli settlements on the Golan Heights have progressively diverted more and more water since the area was occupied after the 1967 war and once the joint Syrian-Jordanian dam is built on the Yarmouk, one of the river’s main tributaries, the flow will reduce further.
A century ago, the River Jordan was mighty, up to 160 meters wide in places. Now it is little more than a trickle as it enters the sea. The river is so narrow that at the newly inaugurated Baptism Site archaeological park 20 minutes drive north of its mouth, crackle of the walkie-talkies carried by Israeli soldiers stationed in the rushes on the opposite bank is easily heard.
Quality too, has suffered. While a contemporary St. John would still just be able to baptize his acolytes, whether he would want to is another matter.
“The Jordan is now at 10 percent of its flow in the 1920s and even that is composed heavily of sewage and waste water,” explains Abd Sultan, office director at the Jordanian branch of Friends of the Earth. “The river has suffered two major reductions in flow, the first when Israel built the National Water Carrier and the second when Jordan built the King Abdullah Canal.”
If the problem is easy to understand, it is more complicated to resolve. Straddling the border between Jordan, Palestine and Israel and fed by water sources that originate in Lebanon and Syria, the Dead Sea lies, literally and metaphorically, at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
If its plight is a source of controversy some blaming regional politics, others blaming demographic growth, industrial development and environmental unawareness the solution proposed by Israel and Jordan, neither of whom can afford to lose the sea, ruffles just as many feathers.
The plan, called Red to Dead, is to replenish the Dead Sea by constructing a pipeline that will transport 1600 million cubic meters of water each year from the Red Sea. About half this amount will be pumped straight into the sea. The rest will be turned into drinking water at a desalination plant in the Jordan Valley, run using hydroelectric power generated by the pipeline.
When Jordanian Water Minister Hazem Nasser officially unveiled the $8 billion project at the Johannesburg summit, it prompted a walkout by the Palestinian delegation. They called the pipeline ‘inappropriate’ given the situation in the Occupied Territories. It also drew fire from countries including Syria, pre-war Iraq and Saudi Arabia, for whom the pipeline represented a “normalization” of relations with Israel.
For Jordan, one of the thirstiest nations on earth and which ranks just behind countries like Sudan and Namibia for scarcity, the pipeline could one day make the difference between life and death.
Friends of the Earth agrees, to a point.
“The biggest problem with water in Jordan is not the scarcity, though we don’t have much, it’s the inefficient manner what we have is used and distributed,” says Sultan. “We estimate that up to 50 percent of our water is lost through leaky, broken pipes and illegal connections.”
Royal Society director Chris Johnson makes a similar point.
“How much of that extra water would only end up flowing down Amman’s streets?” he asks. “If we invested even $2 billion of that $8 billion in water efficiency and conservation projects, we wouldn’t need this kind of scheme.”
But beyond the obvious political implications of the project, there are also worries about the effect the cure might have on the patient.
“The idea of pumping water from the Red Sea is not based on any scientific understanding,” explains Johnson. “It will mix waters of completely different kinds.”
How quickly and even how fully the two waters might mix is just one of the unknowns. Friends of the Earth estimates that given the massive amount of water involved, up to 800 square meters of the sea around the outflow would be permanently Red, not Dead.
“This could lead to increased sedimentation, it could destroy the ecosystem, maybe even introduce algal bloom from the Red Sea,” says Shehadeh. “The trouble is, we don’t know.”
Jordan’s environmentalists worry that the Dead Sea’s unique properties and eco system are both potentially at risk.
“Our position at Friends of the Earth is not to say no to the plan. Jordan needs water but we feel we need a regional water plan first,” says Sultan. “We don’t necessarily need to bring more water, what we need to do is use the water we have in better ways.”
“The best way to solve the problem is to get rid of all the dams and let the rivers flow again,” says Johnson. “Then they could spend the money to build a desalination plant and not pump the Jordan at all.”
Everyone agrees that something has to be done. If the Dead Sea disappears, it will be a cultural, ecological and economic disaster but it is possible the sea may have a surprise in store.
“Because the Dead Sea is so salty, it absorbs moisture out of the air, it’s called hydration,” says Sultan. “The more the sea reduces, the saltier it gets and the more moisture it will absorb.”
Friends of the Earth believe it is possible that this may kick off a cycle. As the sea absorbs water from the air, drying it, the air will find sources from which to rehydrate itself. Fittingly, in a region well acquainted with historical and geographical irony, the only sources available are the very dams and reservoirs currently starving the Dead Sea into retreat.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

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