Is the solution to the climate crisis in the depths of the Dead Sea?
An Israeli group of geologists has been exploring the deep layers of the Dead Sea bottom for the past decade, with the aim of uncovering the area's climatic history and producing local and global climatic forecasts.
And in short: we are in a period of dehydration that will last at least another thousand years
Lior Sack, Angle
23/02/2022
Wednesday, 23 February 2022, 14:39 Updated: 15:00
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The solution to the climate crisis lies in the depths of the Dead Sea (Photo: Angle)
What is hidden in the depths of the Dead Sea?
What information lies beneath the bottom of the lowest lake in the world?
These are some of the questions that led a group of Israeli scientists to start drilling in the Dead Sea area, to try and extract its secrets from the depths of the earth.
The Dead Sea Deep Drilling Exploration Project, which began in November 2010 and continues to this day, provides a rare glimpse into the climatic conditions that have prevailed in the eastern Mediterranean basin for the past hundreds of thousands of years.
Soil layers located hundreds of meters below the bottom of the Dead Sea document periods of flooding, periods of prolonged drought and heavy rains, and are a tool for learning the past, from which one can deduce the climatic conditions that will prevail in our region in the future.
The largest international research drilling project conducted in Israel, led by a team led by Prof. Moti Stein of the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Geological Survey of Israel and the ICDP Scientific Drilling Organization, is carried out in a unique location.
The Dead Sea Basin is located between the desert area and the Mediterranean climate zone, as a result of which the Dead Sea receives water and alluvial materials from two different climate zones.
"The deep drilling in the Dead Sea teaches us about the climatic history of the Levant over the last 220,000 years," says Stein.
"Geological and geochemical observations observed in drilling have enormous potential for understanding past and present climatic phenomena."
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Dead Sea (Photo: Depositphotos)
Capsules of time
The drilling researchers remove drilling pits from the earth's belly - cylinders of varying lengths of several meters, which consist of dark and light layers a few millimeters thick, called species.
"To date, close to 1,000 cubic meters (cubic meters) have been extracted from the earth's interior," says Stein.
Dark species are made up of thin alluvial materials and carry information about their sources and ways of transporting them to the lake, for example by floods.
"
The drilling cores were extracted in two main drillings in the Dead Sea in 2010 and 2011 from a depth of up to 450 meters below the bottom of the Dead Sea.
The composition of the layers in the drilling rollers and the water trapped within the layers, make it possible to restore the conditions that prevailed in the Dead Sea, such as the salinity of the water, for example, or the height of the water level in the lake at sunset.
"The source of the water that fed the lake can be traced back to the time when the salt in the white layers sank," Stein explains.
"We do this by measuring the chemical elements in the water. For example, there is a big difference in the composition of water that comes from the North Jordan to water that comes from floods that reach the lake through the Arava River."
The identification of changes in water composition along the layers in the drilling core indicates cycles between wet periods and extreme dry periods over hundreds of thousands of years.
"When the study data were cross-referenced with a study by Dr. Yael Kiro, a geochemist from the Weizmann Institute of Science, which deals with the changing ratios of uranium isotope ratios along the drilling core column, we identified extreme dry periods in which the Jordan did not flow and the Dead Sea came mainly from the Arava.
This condition characterizes the last interglacial period, about 120,000 years ago, "says Stein.
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The drills reached a depth of about 450 meters.
Dead Sea drilling rig (Photo: Moti Stein)
The drilling cores are stored in a facility in Bremen, Germany (Photo: Moti Stein)
A change in sea level marks a change in climate
Not only the drilling cores are used by researchers in the Dead Sea to assess the environmental changes that have taken place around the lake.
Dr. Nurit Weber of Stein's research team found that gypsum structures located at Einot Kedem Beach were formed during periods
when the Dead Sea levels were low, and therefore mark the ancient Dead Sea coastline over the past 7,000 years.
"In many periods over the past thousands of years, the Dead Sea has been at low levels close to its current level as a result of prolonged periods of drought."
118,000-year-old salt crystals found in a drill core in the Dead Sea (Photo: Moti Stein)
Geologists for the environment
"The role of geologists is to tell about natural processes that have happened in the past and continue to exist in the present, while creating future scenarios," Stein says.
"Scientists gather information from different climatic components, and build a general picture that allows them to trace climatic periods that drive climate change in different regions, including the eastern Mediterranean," he says.
"From these findings it can be concluded that we are in a prolonged natural dehydration period that will last at least another thousand years. Regional and global dehydration represents a natural trend that occurs throughout the Holocene period (from 11,700 years ago to the present) and may peak in the coming centuries."
Do the findings of the study at the Dead Sea, therefore, indicate that human activity does not affect global climate change?
Stein explains that the anthropogenic contribution (the impact of human activity on the environment - for example by emitting greenhouse gases from transportation, industry and agriculture) does indeed create an increasing effect on the trend of global warming and dehydration.
"The eastern part of the Mediterranean basin is on the edge of the desert and is naturally subject to dehydration. "Natural dehydration," he says, "in this sense, the Mediterranean basin is a 'hot spot' for climate change related to human activity."
“We geologists strive to increase collaboration with other scientific communities and to assimilate our models with the global climate models,” Stein concludes.
"I believe that the combination of drilling data and climatic models leads to significant implications for understanding the dynamics between the forces that dictate climate change changes at both the regional and global levels."
The article was prepared by Zavit - the news agency of the Israeli Association of Ecology and Environmental Sciences.
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