The Dead Sea is a confluence of extraordinary conditions: the lowest point on the earth’s surface, with one of the world’s highest salinities.
The Dead Sea is a confluence of extraordinary conditions: the lowest point on the earth’s surface, with one of the world’s highest salinities. The high concentration of salt gives it a correspondingly high density, and the water body’s status as the deepest hypersaline lake gives rise to interesting and often temperature-related phenomena below the water’s surface that researchers are still uncovering.
One of the most intriguing features of the Dead Sea continues to be revealed: salt giants, large-scale salt deposits.
“These large deposits in the earth’s crust can be many, many kilometers horizontally, and they can be more than a kilometer thick in the vertical direction,” said UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineering professor Eckart Meiburg, lead author of a paper published in the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics. “How were they generated? The Dead Sea is really the only place in the world where we can study the mechanism of these things today.”
Read more at University of California - Santa Barbara
Photo Credit: GidonPico via Pixabay
