The Dead Sea's lake level is now declining by more than one meter per year, owing mostly to intensive water usage in the watershed area.
However, extreme lake level declines caused by climate change are been documented in the past.
For example, toward the conclusion of the last ice age, the sea level plunged by over 250 meters in a few millennia.
Shrinkage of the dead sea
MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP via Getty Images
A new study recently published in the journal Scientific Reports sheds fresh light on the precise path of this process.
Daniela Müller and Achim Brauer of the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam, together with including collaborators from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, used recently developed tools to study 15,000-year-old sediments from the Dead Sea and the surrounding area, as per ScienceDaily.
They revealed, with extraordinary precision, that the extended period of drought was punctuated by rainy intervals spanning 10 to a hundred years.
This also provided fresh insights into the settlement history of such a region, which is important for human development and allows for better evaluations of present and future trends caused by climate change.
It is critical to understand how the water cycle is altering in response to climate change is particularly sensitive regions, such as the Eastern Mediterranean, where water availability is a key determinant for socioeconomic and political growth.
Geologists can do this by analyzing significant hydroclimatic changes that happened millennia ago.
For example, during the transition from the last ice age to the Holocene, Lake Lisan's water level decreased by around 240 meters in the period 24 to 11 thousand years ago, eventually leading to its transformation into today's Dead Sea.
The scientists determined that the severe long-term reduction in lake level caused by rising dryness was broken up multiple times by wetter periods when global warming took a break.
"We were able to correctly establish the duration of these phases with many decades and, in one case, up to centuries by measuring yearly layers in the sediment," explained Müller.
The precise cause of recurrent pauses in this region's climatic change remains unknown.
It is hypothesized that there are linkages to the North Atlantic climate.
The Dead Sea is the smallest body of water on Earth's surface and has the lowest elevation.
For several decades in the mid-twentieth century, the typical number supplied for the lake's surface level was around 1,300 feet (400 meters) below sea level.
However, beginning in the 1960s, Israel and Jordan began redirecting most of the Jordan River's flow and increasing commercial usage of the lake's water.
As a result of these actions, the Dead Sea's water level dropped precipitously.
By the mid-2010s, lake level measurements were more than 100 feet (30 meters) lower than in the mid-twentieth century.
The Dead Sea is between the Judaean highlands to the west and the Transjordanian plateaus to the east.
Before the water level began to fall, the lake was around 50 miles (80 kilometers) long, 11 miles (18 kilometers) wide, and had a contact area of about 394 square miles (1,020 square km).
The peninsula of Al-Lisn (Arabic for "The Tongue") split the lake on to its eastern side into two unequal basins: the northern basin covered roughly three-fourths of the lake's total surface area and reached a depth of 1,300 feet (400 metres), while the southern basin was much smaller and much shallower, measuring less than 10 feet (3 metres) on average.
