Dead Sea – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Posted By admin on May 12, 2015
The Dead Sea (Hebrew: , Ym HaMla, "Sea of Salt", also Hebrew: , Ym HaMwe, "The Sea of Death",[5] and Arabic: al-Bar al-Mayyit(helpinfo),), also called the Salt Sea, is a salt lake bordered by Jordan to the east, and Palestine and Israel to the west. Its surface and shores are 429 metres (1,407ft) below sea level,[6] Earth's lowest elevation on land. The Dead Sea is 304m (997ft) deep, the deepest hypersaline lake in the world. With 34.2% salinity (in 2011), it is also one of the world's saltiest bodies of water, though Lake Vanda in Antarctica (35%), Lake Assal in Djibouti (34.8%), Lagoon Garabogazkl in the Caspian Sea (up to 35%) and some hypersaline ponds and lakes of the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica (such as Don Juan Pond (44%)) have reported higher salinities. It is 9.6 times as salty as the ocean.[7] This salinity makes for a harsh environment in which animals cannot flourish, hence its name. The Dead Sea is 50 kilometres (31mi) long and 15 kilometres (9mi) wide at its widest point.[2] It lies in the Jordan Rift Valley and its main tributary is the Jordan River.
The Dead Sea has attracted visitors from around the Mediterranean basin for thousands of years. In the Bible, it is a place of refuge for King David. It was one of the world's first health resorts (for Herod the Great), and it has been the supplier of a wide variety of products, from asphalt for Egyptian mummification to potash for fertilizers. People also use the salt and the minerals from the Dead Sea to create cosmetics and herbal sachets.
The Dead Sea water has a density of 1,240kg/m3, which makes swimming similar to floating.[8][9]
In Hebrew, the Dead Sea is Ym ha-Mela(helpinfo) ( ), meaning "sea of salt" (Genesis 14:3). In the Bible, the Dead Sea is called the Salt Sea, the Sea of the Arabah, and the Eastern Sea. The designation "Dead Sea" never appears in the Bible.
In prose sometimes the term Ym ha-Mvet ( , "sea of death") is used, due to the scarcity of aquatic life there.[10] In Arabic the Dead Sea is called al-Bahr al-Mayyit(helpinfo)[5] ("the Dead Sea"), or less commonly bar l ( , "the Sea of Lot"). Another historic name in Arabic was the "Sea of Zoar", after a nearby town in biblical times. The Greeks called it Lake Asphaltites (Attic Greek , h Thlatta asphaltts, "the Asphaltite[11] sea"). The Bible also refers to it as Ym ha-Mizra ( , "the Eastern sea") and Ym ha-rv ( , "Sea of the Arabah").
The Dead Sea is an endorheic lake located in the Jordan Rift Valley, a geographic feature formed by the Dead Sea Transform (DST). This left lateral-moving transform fault lies along the tectonic plate boundary between the African Plate and the Arabian Plate. It runs between the East Anatolian Fault zone in Turkey and the northern end of the Red Sea Rift offshore of the southern tip of Sinai. It is here that the Upper Jordan River/Sea of Galilee/Lower Jordan River water system comes to an end.
The Jordan River is the only major water source flowing into the Dead Sea, although there are small perennial springs under and around the Dead Sea, forming pools and quicksand pits along the edges.[12] There are no outlet streams.
Rainfall is scarcely 100mm (4in) per year in the northern part of the Dead Sea and barely 50mm (2in) in the southern part.[13] The Dead Sea zone's aridity is due to the rainshadow effect of the Judaean Mountains. The highlands east of the Dead Sea receive more rainfall than the Dead Sea itself.
To the east of the Dead Sea, the Judaean mountains rise less steeply and are much lower than the mountains to the east. Along the southwestern side of the lake is a 210m (700ft) tall halite formation called "Mount Sodom".
There are two contending hypotheses about the origin of the low elevation of the Dead Sea. The older hypothesis is that it lies in a true rift zone, an extension of the Red Sea Rift, or even of the Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa. A more recent hypothesis is that the Dead Sea basin is a consequence of a "step-over" discontinuity along the Dead Sea Transform, creating an extension of the crust with consequent subsidence.
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Dead Sea - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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