Dead Sea

Interesting facts

At about 304 metres deep, the Dead Sea is the deepest hypersaline lake in the world.

In 1980, after an unusually rainy winter, the normally dark blue sea turned red with a bloom of Dunaliella algae and red-pigmented salt-loving microbes.

The sea still releases lumps of natural asphalt from deep seeps; the Greeks and Romans called it the Asphalt Lake, and Egyptian embalmers used its bitumen.

Its salt is only about 30 percent sodium chloride, compared with roughly 85 percent in ocean water, and it holds the highest bromide concentration of any water on Earth.

For centuries the lake was split into two layers of different temperature and saltiness; they mixed in the winter of 1978–79, and layering has since begun to return.

Mount Sodom, on the southwest shore, is a ridge about 210 metres high made largely of rock salt squeezed upward from deep beneath the basin.

Air pressure at the shore runs about five percent above standard sea-level pressure, so each breath carries slightly more oxygen than at the coast.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were found from the late 1940s in caves near Qumran, about a mile inland from the northwestern shore.

During the last Ice Age its predecessor, Lake Lisan, stood at least 100 metres higher, reaching its peak around 26,000 years ago.

The highways along its shores, at roughly 393 metres below sea level, are the lowest roads on Earth.

Why it is worth it

The Dead Sea's basic party trick — you cannot sink in it — comes down to raw density. At roughly 34% salinity, nearly ten times saltier than the ocean, the water itself weighs about 1.24 kg per liter, dense enough that a human body floats almost involuntarily. The real hazard hides in that same fact: flipping face-down is dangerous, because the hyper-salty water is difficult to right yourself out of and swallowing even a little can be harmful; most safety warnings here exist for a genuine, non-obvious reason, not to spoil the fun.

Its shores mark the lowest point of exposed land on any continent, and the number keeps changing — the surface has been dropping by roughly a meter a year since the 1990s. That's not ordinary evaporation; it's downstream of the Jordan River being diverted for agriculture and drinking water by Israel, Jordan and Syria, cutting off more than 90% of the sea's historical inflow. The basin itself sits inside a tectonic rift, part of the same fault system that runs south into East Africa's Great Rift Valley — so the sea isn't just low because water evaporated out of a bowl, it's low because the ground itself has been pulling apart for millions of years.

The most visible modern consequence of the shrinking sea is underground: as the shoreline retreats, fresh groundwater that used to be held back by the sea's pressure now moves in and dissolves buried salt layers, hollowing out cavities that suddenly collapse into sinkholes. Thousands have opened along the retreating coast since the 1980s, actively reshaping roads and beaches — this is a landscape changing within a single human lifetime, not over geological time.

Good to know

The mineral-rich mud and unusually filtered sunlight here (partly due to constant evaporative haze at such a low elevation) have long made the shore a destination for skin-condition and respiratory treatment, alongside active potash and bromine extraction industries in the southern basin.

Best time to visit

Spring and autumn are the most comfortable for swimming and floating; summer temperatures at this low elevation regularly exceed 40°C with heavy evaporative haze.

Getting there

34 km from Ma‘ale Adummim. Queen Alia International Airport (AMM) is about 53 km away.

Dead Sea

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Good to know

Best time to visit

Getting there

Plan your visit

On these lists

From the encyclopaedia