100 Fun Facts About Dead Sea

Despite its name, what kind of body of water is the Dead Sea?

It sits in an endorheic basin, meaning no streams flow out of it; water leaves only by evaporation.

Which country borders the Dead Sea on its eastern shore?

Israel and the West Bank lie on the western side.

What is the Dead Sea's main tributary?

The river has been so heavily diverted that it now supplies only about a sixth of the lake's inflow, less than direct rainfall.

As of 2025, roughly how far below sea level is the surface of the Dead Sea?

That makes its shores the lowest land-based elevation on Earth, and the level keeps falling.

Compared with ordinary seawater, the Dead Sea is roughly how much saltier?

Its salinity was 34.2% in 2011, against about 3.5% for seawater.

Why can anyone float effortlessly in the Dead Sea?

At about 1.24 kg per litre the brine simply holds a human body up, much like Utah's Great Salt Lake.

How deep is the Dead Sea at its deepest point?

That makes it the deepest hypersaline lake in the world.

Why is the lake called 'dead'?

Only tiny quantities of bacteria and microbial fungi survive in the brine.

The Dead Sea's surface area shrank from 1,050 sq km in 1930 to about how much by the 2020s?

Diversion of the Jordan River since the 1960s is the main cause; the level has been dropping more than a metre a year.

The oldest and most common Hebrew name for the lake translates as what?

Yam HaMelah appears in both biblical and modern Hebrew; the Talmud also calls it the Sea of Sodom.

Ancient Greek and Roman geographers usually named the lake after which substance that floated on it?

Lacus Asphaltites reflected a large trade in the free-floating bitumen the lake still spits up from deep seeps.

The Arabic name 'Sea of Lot' refers to whose nephew?

Lot's wife was said to have turned into a pillar of salt during the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Which second-century Roman historian called the lake the 'Jewish Sea'?

Pliny the Elder, meanwhile, located the Essenes on its western shore above the town of Engeda.

The Dead Sea lies on the boundary between which two tectonic plates?

The Dead Sea Transform fault runs from Turkey's East Anatolian Fault down to the Red Sea Rift.

The 210-metre-tall formation of halite along the lake's south-western shore is called what?

Heavy sediment squeezed ancient salt beds upward like mud creeping up the sides of a bucket, leaving the salt mount standing as a cliff.

Geologists call the ancient Mediterranean inlet that once flooded the Dead Sea valley what?

It was linked to the sea through what is now the Jezreel Valley and left rock salt 2.3 km thick.

The Dead Sea is the last remnant of a much larger prehistoric body of water known by what name?

Between 70,000 and 12,000 years ago Lisan's level stood 100 to 250 metres higher than today's lake.

What Köppen climate type does the Dead Sea have?

It gets under 50 mm of rain a year and averages 192 days above 30 °C.

Compared with sea level, the air at the Dead Sea has a slightly higher content of what?

The extra atmospheric pressure at such low elevation seems to help patients with reduced lung function.

Which metal's chloride makes up about half of the Dead Sea's dissolved salt, unlike the ocean's sodium salt?

Early-1980s analysis put magnesium chloride at 50.8% and sodium chloride at just 30.4%; the ocean's salt is about 85% sodium chloride.

The Dead Sea has the highest concentration of which ion of any water on Earth?

Israel extracts about 206,000 tons of elemental bromine a year from the brine.

What happened to the Dead Sea's water column in the winter of 1978-79?

The upper layer had become saltier than the lower one; once it cooled and grew denser, the lake overturned into a single homogeneous body.

After a rainy winter in 1980, the Dead Sea briefly turned which colour?

Diluted brine let an alga called Dunaliella bloom, which fed red-pigmented halobacteria.

Egyptian mummification used which product imported from the Dead Sea region?

The lake still discharges pebbles and blocks of the black bitumen from deep seeps.

The Dead Sea's reduced ultraviolet light is used in photoclimatherapy for which skin condition?

The weaker UVB lets patients sunbathe for longer stretches safely.

According to Genesis, which two cities destroyed by fire from heaven stood near the Dead Sea?

Admah, Zeboim and Zoar were the other 'Cities of the Plain'; Zoar was spared when Lot fled there.

Where near the Dead Sea was King David said to have hidden from Saul?

The oasis later thrived on Judean date palms and a secret-recipe persimmon perfume made for the Temple.

Which people monopolised the Dead Sea's trade in the Hellenistic period?

Anchorages have been found on both shores, including a Hasmonean-era dry dock at Khirbet Mazin.

Which king built the famous fortress of Masada on the Dead Sea's western shore?

His other Dead Sea fortress, Machaerus on the eastern bank, is where Josephus says John the Baptist was imprisoned and died.

Per Josephus, how many Masada defenders died by suicide when the Roman siege ended in 73/74 CE?

The Sicarii had seized the fortress early in the First Jewish-Roman War and held out after the Temple fell in 70 CE.

How did the Roman commander Vespasian test the Dead Sea's buoyancy in 68 CE?

Around the same time the Qumran community appears to have been destroyed.

Which ascetic Jewish sect settled at Qumran on the Dead Sea's western shore?

The Dead Sea Scrolls found in nearby caves are widely thought to have been their library.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in caves near Qumran between 1946 and which year?

Bedouin shepherd Muhammed edh-Dhib made the first find; researchers have since assembled 981 manuscripts from 11 caves.

Almost all of the Dead Sea Scrolls are held in which building at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem?

Only fewer than a dozen of the manuscripts survive nearly intact; the rest are among some 15,000 fragments.

Masada was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001 chiefly because of what?

The attack ramp and camps are the best-preserved Roman siege installations anywhere, and the site draws around 750,000 visitors a year.

The sixth-century Madaba Map shows that trade across the Dead Sea flourished during which period?

Greek Orthodox monks were drawn to the region's remoteness, founding monasteries such as Mar Saba.

Which crop was cultivated on the Dead Sea's shores from the Crusader period, peaking under the Mamluks?

The region otherwise declined and lost population from the seventh century onward.

Which US naval officer led an 1848 boat expedition down the river into the Dead Sea?

Christopher Costigan in 1835 and Thomas Molyneux in 1847 had explored the lake by boat before him.

The 'Shapira Strips', a supposedly ancient scroll presented in 1883, turned out to be what?

Moses Wilhelm Shapira had sold fake 'Moabite' antiquities after the 1868 Moabite Stone find; disgraced, he took his own life.

The Palestine Potash Company supplied half of which country's potash in World War II?

Its founder Moses Novomeysky had first visited the lake in 1911; both plants were destroyed in the 1948 war.

The Dead Sea Works was acquired by which company when it was privatised in 1995?

Israeli firms make around US$3 billion a year from Dead Sea minerals, chiefly potash and bromine.

The Dead Sea has been shrinking rapidly since the 1960s mainly because of what?

Israel's National Water Carrier, finished in 1964, cut the inflow from about 1.2 billion cubic metres a year to under 100 million.

What is causing the large sinkholes appearing along the Dead Sea's western shore?

As the lake drops, brine drains from underground layers, freshwater rushes in and dissolves the salt, and the cavities collapse; most northern beach resorts have had to close.

The plan to refill the Dead Sea with brine piped from which body of water was abandoned in 2021?

The 180 km pipeline from near Aqaba would have desalinated seawater for Jordan and sent the brine on to the lake; it never broke ground.

Which alga bloomed after the rainy winter of 1980, feeding the bacteria that turned the lake red?

Red-pigmented halobacteria fed on it; the algae have not returned in measurable numbers since.

What did scuba-diving scientists discover in the Dead Sea floor in 2011?

Biofilms around the fissures held numerous species of bacteria and archaea despite the extreme salinity.

Where are most of Israel's Dead Sea hotels concentrated?

Israel's 15 shoreline hotels earned $291 million in 2012, mostly along a six-kilometre stretch.

Which mineral do the two Dead Sea potash firms harvest from evaporation pans before refining it?

The pans have essentially diked the entire southern end of the lake, split by a dike along the international border.

Jordan's Dead Sea mineral industries generate about $1.2 billion in sales, roughly what share of its GDP?

Arab Potash, formed in 1956, produces 2 million tons of potash a year at Safi.

Which numbered road runs the Israeli shore for 565 km, from Metula to near Eilat?

It stretches 565 km; Highway 65 plays the same role on the Jordanian side down to Aqaba.

Which Greek philosopher wrote of a 'fabled' lake in Palestine where a bound man floats?

His Meteorology adds that the water was so bitter no fish lived in it, and that soaking and shaking clothes in it got them clean.

Which Antarctic water body, at roughly 44% salinity, dwarfs the Dead Sea for saltiness?

Lake Vanda in Antarctica, Lake Assal in Djibouti and the Caspian's Garabogazköl lagoon have also reported higher salinities than the Dead Sea.

What did the British build at Kalia and name after two doomed biblical cities?

The Mandate-era course sat beside the Palestine Potash Company's first plant, which began production at Kalya in 1931.

'Sodomite salt' flavoured Temple incense but was said to be risky at home, causing what?

The same rabbinic sources describe a secret-recipe persimmon perfume produced on the shore for the Temple's fragrance.

Which prophet's book foretells that the sea will 'be healed and made fresh'?

Zechariah 14:8 has a similar vision of living waters flowing from Jerusalem, half to the eastern sea and half to the western.

During the First Temple period, which kingdom held the Dead Sea's eastern shore?

Judah ruled the western shore and built fortresses along it, while the Edomites lay to the south.

How many people listed 'Dead Sea & Jordan' as home in the 1922 census of Palestine?

By the 1931 census the figure had jumped to 535, including 230 Jews drawn by the new potash works.

Which Judaean Desert monastery founded by Greek Orthodox monks is still a pilgrimage site?

Saint George's monastery in Wadi Kelt is the other famous survivor of the monks who sought the region's remoteness.

The Dead Sea's aridity is blamed on the rain shadow of which range?

Oddly, the highlands just east of the lake get more rain than the lake itself, and the northern shore gets twice the southern shore's 50 mm.

How long is the Dead Sea's main northern basin?

It is 15 km across at its widest, and a shoreline of about 135 km wraps the whole lake.

The salt hill on the lake's south-western shore still rises by roughly how much a year?

The hill is about 80% salt, capped by limestone, clay and conglomerate dragged up with it from the valley floor.

The peninsula dividing the lake's two basins is named from the Arabic for what?

It lies entirely in Jordan and, like the salt hill across the water, is mostly white calcareous sediment laced with salt and gypsum.

Explorer Christopher Costigan, honoured by a cape on the lake, died in 1835 from what?

He had made the first known boat trip on the lake in modern times; Cape Molyneux honours a Royal Navy officer who died after his own 1847 voyage.

Where does the Dead Sea Works rank among the world's potash producers?

It also turns out de-icers, bath salts and table salt, and uses solar evaporation in ponds just two metres deep rather than mining.

Which country's potash cartel tried to sink the Dead Sea venture in the 1930s by dumping?

The company turned a profit from 1936 anyway; its concession had been granted jointly by the governments of Palestine and Transjordan in 1930.

What record-holding device sits at Ein Bokek, 421 metres below sea level?

A grocery store installed it on its own initiative, making it the lowest ATM on Earth.

Which architect designed Ein Bokek's planned Dead Sea Valley Tourism Complex?

The resort's first hotel went up in 1960; the Zohar hot springs, rich in sulphur, lie three kilometres to the south.

Wadi Mujib, Jordan's canyon river into the lake, was known in the Bible as which stream?

It marked Moab's northern frontier, and King Mesha boasts on his stele of building a road along it.

Which Hasmonean king originally built the fortress of Machaerus above the eastern shore?

Pompey's general Gabinius wrecked it in 57 BCE, and Herod rebuilt it around 30 BCE to guard his lands east of the Jordan.

Ahava's founding idea came after a spa technician watched women tourists doing what?

Ziva Gilad's company began in 1988 as a single stand selling body scrub, and took in a million dollars that first year.

Which Chinese conglomerate agreed to buy a controlling stake in Ahava in 2015?

Disney-family investment firm Shamrock Holdings had bought 20% of the company six years earlier.

Ahava's main factory, a target of boycott campaigns, stood at which West Bank kibbutz?

The kibbutz owned 35% of the company; a London shop closed in 2011 after constant protests outside it.

How many hiding places for treasure does the Copper Scroll list?

One entry alone describes 900 talents of buried silver, about 30 tons; the final entry points to a duplicate document that has never been found.

The corroded Copper Scroll was cut into 23 strips in 1955–56 in which English city?

Professor H. Wright Baker did the cutting on John Allegro's recommendation; Allegro transcribed the text as soon as the strips came apart.

Unlike most of the scrolls, the Copper Scroll has been displayed since 2013 in which city?

It was one of the few finds still in Jordanian hands in 1967, having been kept in Amman rather than at East Jerusalem's Palestine Archaeological Museum.

Which book of the Hebrew Bible is the only one not found among the Dead Sea Scrolls?

One theory is that Qumran's calendar had no place for Purim; another is that a Jewish queen married to a Persian king was frowned upon.

The Bedouin finders sold three of the first scrolls to a dealer for how much?

That was about $28 at the time; in 1954 four of the scrolls changed hands for $250,000.

In June 1954, four Dead Sea Scrolls were advertised for sale in which newspaper?

Yigael Yadin and Benjamin Mazar bought them for $250,000 at New York's Waldorf-Astoria and took them to Jerusalem.

The rare red ink on the Dead Sea Scrolls was made from which mineral?

It appears only four times in the whole collection; the black ink was soot from olive-oil lamps thinned with honey, oil, vinegar or water.

Which numbered Qumran cavern yielded about 90% of all the scroll fragments?

Its roughly 15,000 fragments came from some 500 texts, including nine or ten copies of Jubilees.

At over eight metres, which is the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Found in Cave 11, more than half of it concerns building the Jerusalem Temple; Yigael Yadin saw it as the sect's own Torah, a view his friend Hartmut Stegemann disputed.

Mar Samuel, who acquired four of the first scrolls, was a Metropolitan of which church?

The finds reached him through St Mark's Monastery, where a go-between had sought an appraisal of the strange texts.

From 1993, which US agency's imaging revealed illegible text on scroll fragments?

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory adapted multispectral imaging from its planetary probes, photographing the scrolls at specific wavelengths.

In 2020, which US institution admitted all 16 of its scroll fragments were forgeries?

Fakes have flooded the black market since 2002; the museum had bought its pieces between 2009 and 2014.

Before the scrolls, the oldest Hebrew Bible manuscripts were texts such as which one?

The scrolls pushed the record back more than a thousand years and showed how little the text had changed; the Leningrad Codex is the oldest complete one today.

Khalil 'Kando' Shahin, the Bethlehem dealer behind the first scrolls, was by trade a what?

A sheikh at a Bethlehem market pointed the Bedouins to him after a first dealer had rejected the scrolls as worthless.

Which Roman governor led the Tenth Legion's siege of Masada?

Bassus had taken Machaerus across the lake a year or two earlier; the Romans used some 15,000 troops and prisoners against Masada.

Geologists found the Roman assault ramp at Masada consists mostly of what?

Investigations in the early 1990s confirmed the 114-metre ramp needed far less fill than the legend suggests.

Despite Josephus's suicide tale, remains of at most how many people were found at Masada?

Twenty-five were in a cave below the southern wall, where pig bones hint they may have been Romans rather than rebels.

A 2,000-year-old date seed from Masada was sprouted and nicknamed after which patriarch?

It was the oldest known seed ever germinated until a 2012 record, and as of 2024 is still the oldest grown from a seed.

Which IDF chief of staff began swearing in armoured corps recruits atop Masada?

Recruits climbed the Snake Path by night and ended the torchlit ceremony with the vow 'Masada shall not fall again'.

Which electronic musician staged a concert beside Masada in 2017?

The fortress has also served as the main setting of The Dovekeepers and the fourth season of Preacher.

In 1900 the PEF carved a line into a rock at Ein Feshkha to track what?

The 'PEF rock' was read twice a year until 1913, then forgotten until geographer Zev Vilnay rediscovered it after the Six-Day War.

Ein Feshkha's wetlands are the only place where two species of which fish live together?

Pools are being built to protect the Blue and Dead Sea killifish, and the reserve is also an Important Bird Area for griffon vultures.

Excavator Roland de Vaux identified Qumran with which place listed in the Book of Joshua?

Others prefer Secacah from the same verse, since the Copper Scroll's description of Secacah's waterworks matches Qumran's cisterns.

The Jordan Valley segment of the Dead Sea fault last had a major earthquake in which year?

The slip stored since then is enough for a magnitude 7.4 event; the other years saw big quakes on the Wadi Arabah segment to the south.

What kind of motion characterises the Dead Sea Transform fault?

Both plates drift north-northeast, but Arabia moves faster, so the eastern side has crept about 107 km ahead of the African side.

19th-century British officers first imagined linking the seas to bypass what?

They had not yet realised how far below sea level the lake lies; Theodor Herzl later dreamed of using that drop to generate power.

The scrapped Two Seas Canal from Aqaba to the lake carried a price tag of about how much?

Seawater would have been pumped 230 metres uphill from Aqaba before dropping to the lake, with the first phase alone costed at $1.1 billion.

The Early Bronze Age cemetery at Bab edh-Dhra is estimated to hold how many shaft tombs?

Archaeologists reckon they contain over half a million bodies; later residents switched to mudbrick charnel houses dubbed 'body libraries'.