The lake level of the Dead Sea is currently dropping by more than one metre every year - mainly because of the heavy water consumption in the catchment area.
The lake level of the Dead Sea is currently dropping by more than one metre every year - mainly because of the heavy water consumption in the catchment area. However, very strong lake level drops due to climate changes are also known from earlier times. At the end of the last ice age, for example, the water level dropped by almost 250 metres within a few millennia. A study published today in the journal Scientific Reports now provides new insights into the exact course of this process. Daniela Müller and Achim Brauer from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam, together with colleagues from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studied 15,000-year-old sediments from the Dead Sea and the surrounding area using newly developed methods. With unprecedented accuracy, they show that the long period of drought was interrupted by wet periods lasting ten to a hundred years. This also offers new insights into the settlement history of this region, which is significant for human development, and enables better assessments of current and future developments driven by climate change.
The water cycle at the Dead Sea - then and now
In highly sensitive regions such as the Eastern Mediterranean, where water availability is an important factor for socio-economic and political development, it is crucial to understand how the water cycle is changing in response to climate change. Geologists can achieve this by assessing strong hydroclimatic changes that occurred several millennia back in time. For example, during the transition from the last ice age to the Holocene, the water level of Lake Lisan dropped by about 240 metres in the period 24-11 thousand years ago, which eventually led to its transition into today's Dead Sea.
Read more at: GFZ Geoforschungszentrum Potsdam, Helmoholtz Centre
Sediments formed in the Lisan lake during lake level highstand between ca 24.000 and 14.000 years ago. Today, these lacustrine deposits are found more than 200 metres above the water level of the Dead Sea. View from Masada across the Dead Sea. (Photo Credit: GFZ)
