Dead Sea
The Dead Sea, also known by [|other names], is a landlocked salt lake bordered by Jordan to the east, the West Bank to the west and Israel to the southwest. It lies in the endorheic basin of the Jordan Rift Valley, and its main tributary is the Jordan River.
As of 2025, 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%, 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, 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 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.
Names
The English name "Dead Sea" is a calque of the Arabic name, itself a calque of earlier Greek and Latin names, in reference to the scarcity of aquatic life caused by the lake's extreme salinity.Historical English names include the Salt Sea, Lake of Sodom from the biblical account of its destruction and from Greek and Latin.
The name "Dead Sea" occasionally appears in Hebrew literature as ,. However, the most common name for the lake in both biblical and modern Hebrew—and also its oldest known name—is the . Other Hebrew names for the lake also mentioned in the Bible are the Sea of Arabah and the Eastern Sea. In the Talmud, it is called or.
The Arabic name is , or usually without the article. It is also known in Arabic as the from the nephew of Abraham whose wife was said to have turned into a pillar of salt during the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Less often, it has been known in Arabic as the Sea of Zoara from a formerly important city along its shores.
Because of the large volume of ancient trade in the lake's naturally occurring free-floating bitumen, its usual names in ancient Greek and Roman geography were some form of Asphalt Lake or Asphalt Sea.
It was also known as the 'Dead Sea'. Another ancient name is the "Jewish Sea,", a term used by the second-century Roman historian Tacitus.
Geography
The Dead Sea is a salt lake bordered by Jordan to the east and Palestine's Israeli-occupied West Bank and Israel to the west. It is an endorheic lake, meaning there are no outlet streams.The Dead Sea lies in the Jordan Rift Valley, a geographic feature formed by the Dead Sea Transform. This left lateral-moving transform fault lies along the tectonic plate boundary between the African Plate and the Arabian Plate. It runs between the East Anatolian Fault zone in Turkey and the northern end of the Red Sea Rift offshore of the southern tip of Sinai.
Water feeds into the Dead Sea from various sources, many small or intermittent, including:
- Jordan River, international border from the north
- Arava Stream, international border from the south
- Wadi Mujib, Jordan, Karak Governorate
- Wadi Darga, West Bank
- Wadi al-Hasa, Jordan, boundary between Karak Governorate and Tafilah Governorate
- Nahal Arugot, mouth at Ein Gedi, Israel
- Wadi Wala, Jordan side
- Wadi Zarqa Ma'in, Jordan side
- Nahal Tur, West Bank
- Nahal Og, West Bank
- Groundwater seepage
- Direct rainfall
There are also small perennial springs under and around the Dead Sea, forming pools and quicksand pits along the edges.
The Wadi Mujib valley, 420 m below the sea level in the southern part of the Jordan valley, is a biosphere reserve, with an area of.
Rainfall is scarcely per year in the northern part of the Dead Sea and barely in the southern part. The Dead Sea zone's aridity is due to the rainshadow effect of the Judaean Mountains. The highlands east of the Dead Sea receive more rainfall than the Dead Sea itself.
To the west of the Dead Sea, the Judaean mountains rise less steeply and are much lower than the mountains to the east. Along the southwestern side of the lake is a tall halite mineral formation called Mount Sodom.
Geology
Formation theories
There are two contending hypotheses about the origin of the low elevation of the Dead Sea. The older hypothesis is that the Dead Sea lies in a true rift zone, an extension of the Red Sea Rift, or even of the Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa. A more recent hypothesis is that the Dead Sea basin is a consequence of a "step-over" discontinuity along the Dead Sea Transform, creating an extension of the crust with consequent subsidence.Sedom Lagoon
During the late Pliocene-early Pleistocene, what is now the valley of the Jordan River, Dead Sea, and the northern Wadi Arabah was repeatedly inundated by waters from the Mediterranean Sea. The waters formed in a narrow, crooked bay that is called by geologists the Sedom Lagoon, which was connected to the sea through what is now the Jezreel Valley. The floods of the valley came and went depending on long-scale changes in the tectonic and climatic conditions.The Sedom Lagoon extended at its maximum from the Sea of Galilee in the north to somewhere around south of the current southern end of the Dead Sea, and the subsequent lakes never surpassed this expanse. The Hula Depression was never part of any of these water bodies due to its higher elevation and the high threshold of the Korazim block separating it from the Sea of Galilee basin.
Salt deposits
The Sedom Lagoon deposited evaporites mainly consisting of rock salt, which eventually reached a thickness of on the old basin floor in the area of today's Mount Sedom.Lake formation
According to Kafri, during the late Neogene, i.e. in the Pliocene, the eustatic sea level was at 50–100 metres above the current sea level, thus flooding the northern valleys connecting the Mediterranean Sea with the Jordan Rift Valley, which led to the creation of a crooked-shaped lagoon. This high eustatic sea level situation subsequently came to an end, and the ocean could no longer flood the area. Thus, the long lagoon became a landlocked lake, which – due to the high evaporation rate – retreated toward the lower, southern part of the rift valley. However, Mordechai Stein considers the formation process as not yet clarified, speaking of a late Pliocene-early Pleistocene process in which tectonics might also have played a part in blocking water ingression from the Mediterranean to its former bay or lagoon.The first prehistoric lake to follow the Sedom Lagoon is named Lake Amora, followed by Lake Lisan and finally by the Dead Sea.
Lake salinity
The water levels and salinity of the successive lakes have either risen or fallen as an effect of the tectonic dropping of the valley bottom, and due to climate variation. As the climate became more arid, Lake Lisan finally shrank and became saltier, leaving the Dead Sea as its last remainder.From 70,000 to 12,000 years ago, Lake Lisan's level was higher than its current level, possibly due to lower evaporation than in the present. Its level fluctuated dramatically, rising to its highest level around 26,000 years ago, indicating a very wet climate in the Near East. Around 10,000 years ago, the lake's level dropped dramatically, probably even lower than today. During the last several thousand years, the lake has fluctuated approximately, with some significant drops and rises. Current theories as to the cause of this dramatic drop in levels rule out volcanic activity; therefore, it may have been a seismic event.