The Lowest Point in the World

The Dead Sea is the lowest point on the land surface of the earth. In August 2026 its level stood at 441 meters and 16 centimeters below sea level.

'Below sea level' means something simple: if a canal were dug from the Mediterranean Sea to here, the water would flow here and fill the valley.

And why is it so salty? Because it is a lake without an outlet. The Jordan river and other streams bring water into it; no river takes water out of it. The water that leaves it leaves through the air only — it evaporates. And salt does not evaporate. It stays. And so, over thousands of years, the water kept evaporating and the salt kept accumulating.

The salinity of its water is 34 percent, and it is fourth in the world on the salinity scale. 34 percent means that more than a third of what is in a glass is not water. That is also the reason a person floats there without effort: water that heavy pushes upward.

And because of that salinity there is almost no life in it. There are no fish in it and no plants. And hence its name.

And it is worth stopping for a moment on the words 'without an outlet', because they explain everything. An ordinary river carries salt from the land to the sea, and the sea is big enough for it not to be noticed. A lake without an outlet is the end of the road: everything that comes into it stays in it. The water evaporates and leaves; the salt, the calcium and the potassium that were dissolved in it stay in place. Millions of years of one very simple process are what created what is seen today.

And the Dead Sea is getting smaller. In the last decade the level has been falling a little more than a meter a year. In 2012 it fell by about a meter and forty centimeters — more than the average. That is, this is not a uniform process: there are faster years and slower ones.

And the reasons are not nature alone. The water of the Jordan and of the streams is used on the way for agriculture and for drinking, and so less water reaches the Dead Sea than the evaporation takes from it. Every year in which less comes in than goes out is a year in which the Dead Sea is a little lower.