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Concept
Dead Sea
Summary
The Dead Sea (اَلْبَحْرُ الْمَيْتُ, Āl-Baḥrū l-Maytū; יַם הַמֶּלַח, Yam hamMelaḥ), also known by other names, is a salt lake bordered by Jordan to the east and the West Bank and Israel to the west. It lies in the Jordan Rift Valley, and its main tributary is the Jordan River.
As of 2019, the lake's surface is below sea level, making its shores the lowest land-based elevation on Earth. It is deep, the deepest hypersaline lake in the world. With a salinity of 342 g/kg, or 34.2% (in 2011), it is one of the world's saltiest bodies of water – 9.6 times as salty as the ocean – and has a density of 1.24 kg/litre, which makes swimming similar to floating. This salinity makes for a harsh environment in which plants and animals cannot flourish, hence its name. The Dead Sea's main, northern basin is long and wide at its widest point.
The Dead Sea has attracted visitors from around the Mediterranean Basin for thousands of years. It was one of the world's first health resorts (for Herod the Great), and it has been the supplier of a wide variety of products, from asphalt for Egyptian mummification to potash for fertilisers. Today, tourists visit the sea on its Israeli, Jordanian and West Bank coastlines. The Palestinian tourism industry has been met with setbacks in developing along the West Bank coast due to the Israeli occupation.
The Dead Sea is receding at a swift rate; its surface area today is , having been in 1930. Multiple canal and pipeline proposals, such as the scrapped Red Sea–Dead Sea Water Conveyance project, have been made to reduce its recession.
The English name "Dead Sea" is a calque of the Arabic name Bahr or (البحر الميت), itself a calque of earlier Greek (Νεκρά Θάλασσα, Nekrá Thálassa) and Latin names (Mare Mortuum) in reference to the scarcity of aquatic life caused by the lake's extreme salinity. The name also occasionally appears in Hebrew literature as Yām HaMāvet ( ), 'Sea of Death'.
The usual biblical and modern Hebrew name for the lake is the Sea of Salt (ים המלח, ).
Official source
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