At the break of dawn on a recent Friday, a dozen or so people gathered in the chilly morning air at the lowest point on Earth.
Wrapped in warm sweaters and kitted out in hiking boots, the small group chatted and laughed before setting out on an adventure into what is one of the region’s worst environmental disasters – to explore the shores of the rapidly shrinking Dead Sea.
Following closely behind Sergey Andreyev, a seasoned guide and owner of Wild Adventures, the group’s first stop was the now weed-strewn parking lot of the once world-famous beach and tourist site on the Israeli side of the sea: Ein Gedi.
“Stay close behind me and don’t stray to the right or the left. If you need the bathroom, let me know,” instructed Andreyev, leading the group over a worn metal guardrail and past a sign reading “Danger. Do not enter.”
He has been leading these groups since 2019, so he knows where it is safe to tread and where it might be dangerous. The people following him, of all ages and from all parts of Israel, were there to see what has become of the iconic salty lake and its surroundings.
New attraction
If the image of the sunburnt tourist in a floppy hat floating in the buoyant waters while reading a newspaper was once synonymous with the Dead Sea, the increasingly exposed shoreline with gaping sinkholes – some filled with warm natural water – curious salt formations, crystal-like masses, and an array of stunning stalactites and stalagmites has now created a whole new type of tourist attraction.
Throughout the winter months, from November to March, people from across the country flock to see the environmental and ecological changes – some from natural processes and some caused by human intervention – that have taken hold here.
As Andreyev made his first stop, the reason for all the warnings became clear. Standing on a short stretch of cracked black asphalt that was once part of Road 90, Israel’s longest highway leading from Metula on its northern border all the way down to the country’s southernmost city, Eilat, he explained the obvious: This section of the route is no longer in use after massive sinkholes tore through the road’s surface several years ago.
Despite years of engineering efforts – repeatedly filling the sinkholes and reinforcing the road – to save it and keep the area in use, including the public beach, nature had different plans.
“Nature is much stronger than people,” quipped one of the tour participants as the group peered nervously into a cavernous hole in the middle of the now-sunken road.
Nearby, once-majestic date trees have collapsed in on themselves, and a cluster of dilapidated buildings and mangled metal fences are all that remain of what was once a hugely popular beach and roadside pit stop on the winding stretch of highway.
As part of the tour, Andreyev described the complex ecological process – and human decisions – that have caused this massive devastation, getting the better of mankind and outsmarting their technology.
Environmental process
With the Earth’s climate warming, the particularly salty waters of the Dead Sea, which sits in a location where summer temperatures can reach upward of 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), have been steadily evaporating.
The process has been exacerbated by decades of water diversions from the sea’s main source, the Jordan River. Diversions from the river’s headwaters in Lebanon and Syria, as well as agricultural and national water projects along its course through Israel and Jordan, have also depleted the water flow.
Add to that the water being pumped out by local factories in Israel and Jordan to extract the Dead Sea’s unique natural minerals – potash, bromine, sodium chloride, magnesia, magnesium chloride, and metal magnesium – and the sea’s level, already the lowest on Earth, has been dropping by about one meter per year in recent decades.
Bordered by Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank, the sea is also caught in the midst of geopolitical tensions, meaning that on a global level, the environmental dangers of the disappearing Dead Sea, one of the world’s natural wonders, have not been adequately addressed by the parties that might be able to help.
As the salty waters dry out, however, some unusual ecological processes have taken shape here. Natural waters have pushed their way down from the surrounding mountains, enhanced by winter rains beyond the immediate vicinity, creating rivers of gushing freshwater that flow beneath the Earth’s surface.
This fresh water source has eroded the layers of salt left behind by the receding sea, causing the soil to loosen and leading to the appearance of thousands of sinkholes. A 2017 study by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev counted as many as 5,500, but the number is increasing all the time. From above, the Dead Sea’s shoreline now looks a bit like the surface of planet Mars.
“I have been doing this for seven years and know each one of these sinkholes intimately,” said Andreyev, describing how each one continues to grow in size, while new ones appear all the time.
“You must not stand too close to the edge because they will just collapse,” he warned the group as he led us through the abandoned Ein Gedi tourist site, down a treacherous set of winding brick steps, past rusted beach umbrellas and a crumbling lifeguard station, down to the sea.
Ein Gedi Beach has been closed to the public for nearly a decade, mainly due to the sinkholes and the dangers they pose, but also because the dramatic recession of the sea’s level makes it tricky to reach the water’s edge.
But this group did not come for a dip in the Dead Sea or to take advantage of its known therapeutic powers. They were there to experience some of the new environmental wonders that have arisen and to learn more about the environmental disaster.
“I had no idea this was the situation here,” Ohad Wagner, who was participating in the tour with five friends as part of a birthday excursion for his girlfriend, Sarai Marom, told The Jerusalem Report.
“It’s her birthday, and she wanted to do something special. It was her dream to do this tour,” he said, describing how the couple and their friends stayed in a nearby glamping site and made a two-day trip out of the whole experience.
Marom, who said she was turning 38, told the Report: “I wanted to do something special and get everyone out of the Tel Aviv bubble and into nature.”
Despite some of the challenges of the four-kilometer hike, she said she thought her friends were enjoying it.
Wild attraction
“Everyone has the same reaction when they come on this tour,” Andreyev said, admitting, “You can see the same things in the hotel area, but over there people aren’t paying attention because they are busy with their vacation.”
He was referring to Ein Bokek, a vacation spot a few kilometers south of Ein Gedi, where several large hotels sit on the edge of a more sanitized Dead Sea experience, where the sea’s water has been purified, and soft sand has been laid around the sea’s edge.
In contrast, the scenery here is all natural, wild even, and somewhat surreal.
In fact, all along Road 90, which runs parallel to the Dead Sea’s shoreline, cars were randomly parked in makeshift laybys. These locations denote the start of rough pathways that lead to hidden wadis where fresh water flows down from the mountains into sinkholes, creating natural warm-water pools.
Flouting the warning signs, curious hikers in search of a soothing adventure trekked through the rocky terrain – praying that the earth doesn’t open up beneath them – and tried to reach some of the new natural phenomena that surround this unique lake.
Just north of Ein Gedi, families and groups of friends frolicked in the warm pools, enjoying the oily water and winter sun before trekking back up the mountain to their cars. Even though the turquoise Dead Sea was within reach, people were clearly there for the freshwater pools.
Crystals and treasures
Leading his Wild Adventures group away from the abandoned beach at Ein Gedi, Andreyev also shared with us some of the area’s new wonders.
At the first beach, he scooped up perfectly rounded pellets of salt that look like tiny crystals. At the second, he pulled apart large clumps of the Dead Sea’s famous mineral-rich mud to reveal diamond-like squares of glistening salt.
In between, he pointed out various sinkholes, some filled with invitingly tranquil fresh water, and told the group about the arrival of the first hole – or at least the first noticed by humans – in 1987. He also talked about how people now come to swim in the new pools of water rather than in the sea.
“I started seeing all these cool photos from the Dead Sea on my Facebook feed – salt islands, massive mushrooms of salt – and just fell in love with the idea of visiting here,” said Liat Milrod, who joined the trip with her husband, who was also celebrating a birthday.
“I love nature and would never come to these places alone, so I decided to sign up for this trip,” explained Milrod, who lives in the central town of Be’er Ya’acov. “It’s so beautiful here, and only an hour and a half from my home; it’s so close.”
Lizi Tadela, a friend of Marom’s, agreed that the scenery was beautiful and the tour was “interesting.”
“There was so much I did not know about this area,” she said, adding that she was “now really curious to learn more,” especially about the environmental disaster unfolding there and what might be done to improve the situation.
Finishing off the tour, Andreyev offered some words of comfort to those who had expressed alarm that the Dead Sea might end up dying completely.
He pointed to steps taken in recent years by Israeli authorities to restore some flow to the Jordan River, the Dead Sea’s primary natural water source. In 2022, the government approved a rehabilitation plan for the Lower Jordan River that includes increasing the release of fresh water from Lake Kinneret, south of Tiberias, by tens of millions of cubic meters annually, alongside efforts to reduce pollution and salinity.
While the additional water has yet to reach the Dead Sea itself, environmental experts hope the move marks a significant shift after decades in which the river was largely depleted by diversions and infrastructure projects.
Andreyev also cited a study by the Weizmann Institute that determined the Dead Sea is unlikely to disappear entirely because at some point, nature will win out again and “a new equilibrium is likely to be reached in about 400 years after a water-level decrease of 100 to 150 meters.”
“As long as nothing changes here too dramatically, the sea will not disappear completely,” Andreyev assured the group, leading us back up the mountainside to end the tour.■