Beauty in the darkness
Tourism rising for the Dead Sea, which has been depleting for six decades
Jake Ben Zaken steered his boat along tthe western shore of the Dead Sea, cut tthe motor and bobbed amid tthe white towers of salt rising out of the turquoise water. Just last year, many of these cir- cular towers, their bumpy surfaces now
glistening in the afternoon sun, were beneath the water in this shrinking salty lake.
“I look for WW the beauty in this environ mental crisis,” said Ben Zaken, whose Salty Landscapes boat tours take travellers out onto the surface of the Dead Sea, where the water level is falling by more than one metre a year as human con- sumption depletes its sources. “I’m trying to the see the light, because the darkness is always there.”
The tours — the only current commercial option for boating on the Dead Sea — are part of a tourism industry that, paradoxically, is growing, even as the sea, famous for its highly salinated water, mud and minerals and for being the lowest place on Earth, dries up.
“The Dead Sea is truly a unique phenomenon, one that has drawn explorers
and scientists for a long time,” said Yehouda Enzel, head of the Fredy and Nadine Herrmann Institute of Earth Sciences at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “But now the landscape around it, and under it, is exposed more and more,” she added. Because it is not connected to an ocean, the Dead Sea is not technically a sea, but a lake. For the last 60 years, it has been shrinking as the surrounding populations of Syria, Israel, Jordan and the West Bank have depleted its main water sources — the Jordan River and Sea of Galilee (also a lake) — and as fertilizer and chemical companies in both Israel and Jordan evaporate its water to ex- tract minerals, scientists say. The surface area of the lake has contracted by about a third to its current 391 square kilometres, according to the Geological Survey of Israel. Hotels and spas that once lined the waterfront are now hundreds of yards from the shoreline.