What makes you think that drawing water out of a sea is detrimental at the level we are discussing? How many tons of water do you think moves in and out of the shore on every wave? What about the huge displacement of water on every tide? Or do you think there would be a crater left in the Mediterranean where the water was taken from?
A lot of it has to do with taking water from the Jordan River for other purposes than simply feeding the Dead Sea with more water. Less water goes in, the evaporation rate remains the same (or might even be increasing with climate change), the result is less Dead Sea.
The Dead Sea is about 9 times saltier than sea water, so even sea water will act to dilute the Dead Sea.
Of course, over time it’s always increasing in salinity - even fresh water (aside from distilled) contains some dissolved salts. That’s where the salt in the Dead Sea came from in the first place, the salts in fresh water rivers flowing into the Sea.
I doubt it. It was always a large, highly saline lake, too salty to support life except for a few extremophile microorganisms, set in a very arid desert area. Presumably the intended and optimal outcome will be get the sea back to more or less the size that it was before serious shrinkage began a few decades ago. It was already called the Dead Sea back then, for obvious reasons. Filling it up again may cover up the current damaged shoreline and make everything look a bit nicer and more scenic, which is good for the tourist industry, but it is not going to make the desert bloom. It never did.
I doubt it. It is an extremely arid desert area. It is probably more valuable to everyone concerned if it is fairly full of water and so looks reasonably nice for the tourists that it attracts. Apart from tourism and minerals, I do not think the area is, or ever has been, good for much.
:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
Do you think the Exxon Valdex spill affected Chile? After all, it’s all part of the Pacific and they’re all connected.
I’m basing my concerns mainly on the numbered list found here.
The numbered list at the site you provided was created by a group called " The environmental group Friends of the Earth Middle East". The only thing on their list I could agree with is not putting any coral reefs in danger.
Did you read down further where the article states: “The World Bank Study included environmental assessments carried out under the supervision of the World Bank by world renowned experts found that the environmental risks of the project are manageable if the project is well planned and executed”
Further into the article it gives the conclusion of a group of scientists and professors who studied the project and recommend it go forward.
How much hydro power would this generate? Enough of that could make the desert bloom by desalinating sea water.
How high does the Red Sea need to rise to make this a moot point?
Isn’t a lot of the Jordan valley below sea level? Somewhere beyond Galilee, right? So an unrestricted inflow from any sea would be seriously bad news
Since I know almost nothing about the area, my biggest concern would be ecological contamination. History shows that when different ecosystems (or lifeforms from different ecosystems) come together suddenly, disaster follows. We’ve been fighting invasive species for the past several decades without much luck.
You know they call it the dead sea for a reason, right?
And it’s not like some kind of environmental philistine is proposing to dig a canal between the red sea and the mediterranean or some such.
There may be a miscommunication here as there seem to be 2 issues: first - “are there environmental risks,” and second - “can those risks be mitigated and/or avoided”?
I’d say that yes, there are risks as the first source stated. How severe they are and how effectively they can be reduced is what the above quote highlighted. It looks as though the experts in the area believe such risks can be avoided… (but they are still present).
Environmental risks can be extremely not-obvious to engineers and others involved in the planning of such projects. For example where I live one lake had it’s walleye population wiped out by having an electric generation station use the water for cooling. They didn’t pollute chemically or physicaly damage the environment… but the slightly warmer discharge water elevated the temperature in the main spawning location of the resident walleye by about a degree. For most fish, that wouldn’t really be harmful. Except that walleye eggs are very small, and hatch relativley fast, and are laid in early spring around here. The effect of that small temp elevation caused the fish to spawn a little too soon and the eggs to hatch a little too early in the season for their to be enough phyto and zooplankton for the fry to eat. Therefore, all the babies starved to death every year and the old fish simply expired with none to replace them. Other species of local fish wouldn’t be affected the same way due to different reproductive strategies. You really do need experts to look into these things as not all environmental damage is caused by obvious large scale impacts like dumping millions of gallons of crude oil or blasting all the coral out for shipping lanes.
Conversely, you can do some pretty major construction and manipulation of an environment and have little if any impact if you mitigate properly (which of course costs more money). I’ve been on a project where enough explosives to bring down an office building were set off right in a flowing river channel with barely a dent to the aquatic system.
Not the immediate area, which is dominated by heavy salt deposits and very salty soils.
Might be another source of water for agriculture for the region, though, or for cities.
Like Twoflower, I also thought of the Salton Sea. [Wired overview from 2012]
I googled a bit and was not surpirsed to find an extremely recent hydrogen sulfide event. I was pleasantly surprised to find that a restoration plan has been approved, also extremely recently. Here’s hoping they follow through.
Israel, Jordan unveil $800 million joint plan for red-dead canal
Interesting. The article says that the seawater will first go through a desalination plant, extracting fresh water, and then the “highly saline” byproduct will be sent to the Dead Sea. So they might be adding water that’s just as salty as what’s already there.
From the looks of it, the Dead Sea is a sealed water system, besides having a couple intermittent feeders. The salt came from an early transgress of the sea, so when faulting cut the area off it (the salt) stayed there and will continue to concentrate. Adding sea water from the Med to this system will produce water still far more saline than the med.
I geology, we were asked to postulate how the DS formed (assuming we didn’t already know.) I answered it was an exposed salt dome, so any water that gathers into that exposure will be salty as hell.
The Red Sea would have to rise almost 700 feet to spill to flow into the Dead Sea from the South.
The Mediterranean would “only” have to rise about 200 feet to get into the Jordan Valley South of the Sea of Galilee
So you think the water would rather be dead than red?
But I really doubt that any effuent from a desalination plant is 9 times as salty as the ocean, as someone mentioned the Dead Sea is. There’s a point where it becomes too energy intensive to extract any more fresh water from salty, and that point is reached well before it gets that salty.
Yes, this project has been on-again, off-again under study for a decade or more. That’s what I was thinking of when I mentioned feeding from the Red Sea (Gulf of Aqaba).
It may be only 200 feet up to get to the Jordan Valley from the Mediterranean, but then the water would either contaminate the Jordan River with salt - and it’s used for irrigation, so no - or the pipe would need to cross Palestinian territory too, adding more politics into the mix; plus the potential for eco-catastrophe if the pipe ruptured and salted huge areas of prime farmland. The proposal from the Gulf of Aquaba only involves the two countries. The run-down would mainly cross scrub desert. The water is more salty after fresh water extraction and dumped into the Dead Sea as an alternative to raising the salt content of the dead-end Gulf, which is home to beautiful and fragile reefs.
There are two options in the OP posts - are you filling the Dead Sea to sea level, or simply restoring it to the historical level before excess irrigation from the Jordan dropped it by several dozen feet? The Jordan-Israel project proposes the latter.
Since much of the healthy farmland of the Jordan River valley, not to mention towns such as Jericho, Jordanian resorts and Israeli Kibbutzim(?) (and Masada) are well below sea level, raising the level PAST historical levels is not really an option. It will be a lot of work to raise it that much.
I think it would have to be some massive pumping simply to refill the Dead Sea to historical levels, since it is losing about 3 feet a year to evaporation. I doubt there will be even enough pumping to impact the ecology or flow of the Gulf, since this is a body of water several miles wide and over 100 miles long. (As long as there is some way to prevent hoovering a lot of the fish, so judicious placement of the intake pipe will be key…)