I came back from ten days in Israel and Palestine recently, and I was wondering about certain dam-like structures I saw running across the Dead Sea. They seem to be man-made, because they’re straight lines, but they don’t serve any transportation purpises - no streets or railroads built on them. There were several of them running parallelly. I was thinking that maybe it had to do with some sort of salines, confing water basins, but this doesn’t seem plausible because it looked as if they ran all across the sea to the other side. Does anybody know what they are?
I’ve never been to the Dead Sea, but could they be berms enclosing salt evaporation ponds? Do they still harvest salt from the Dead Sea?
Also never been there, but I’ve seen Discovery channel specials about the area and apparently salt evaporation ponds are big business out there.
Here is a page with some satellite pictures showing this.
That’s what I meant when I was speaking of saline dams confining (excuse the typo) water basins.