In southwest Asia, the Dead Sea is a landlocked Salt Lake situated between Israel and Jordan. Israel owns the southern portion of its western shore, while Jordan owns the eastern portion.
The Dead Sea is the lowest body of water on Earth’s surface and has the lowest elevation. The usual measurement for the lake’s surface level for a number of decades in the middle of the 20th century was about 1,300 feet (400 meters) below sea level.
However, Israel and Jordan started rerouting a large portion of the Jordan River’s flow and utilising more of the lake’s water for business purposes starting in the 1960s. The actions caused the water level of the Dead Sea to decrease dramatically.
The lake level continued to drop by over 3 feet (1 metre) yearly even though measurements taken in the mid-2010s showed that it was more than 100 feet (approximately 30 meters) below the figure from the mid-20th century, or about 1,410 feet (430 meters) below sea level.
The Dead Sea is located between the Transjordanian plateaus to the east and the highlands of Judaea to the west. Prior to the decline in water level, the lake was approximately 50 miles (80 km) in length, reached a maximum width of 11 miles (18 km), and covered an area of approximately 394 square miles (1,020 square km).
The Dead Sea region is a portion of a graben, or downfaulted block of Earth’s crust, located between transform faults along a tectonic plate boundary that extends northward from the spreading centre of the Red Sea and Gulf of Suez to a convergent plate boundary in the southern Turkish Taurus Mountains. From the lake, it is easier to see the eastern fault, which runs along the Moab Plateau’s edge, than the western fault, which denotes the softer Judaean upfold.
