Earth's lowest shore sits 440 metres under ocean level
By 2025 the Dead Sea's surface lay about 439.78 metres below sea level—the planet's lowest land elevation. At 34.2 percent salinity it is roughly 9.6 times saltier than the ocean, dense enough that swimmers float whether they mean to or not.
This endorheic salt lake in the Jordan Rift Valley borders Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel, fed mainly by the Jordan River. The northern basin stretches about fifty kilometres by fifteen at its widest and plunges 304 metres, making it the deepest hypersaline lake known. Density near 1.24 kilograms per litre and extreme salt leave little room for ordinary aquatic life—hence English "Dead Sea," a calque of Arabic and earlier Greco-Latin labels.
Hebrew tradition prefers Yam HamMelaḥ, "Sea of Salt," with biblical Sea of Arabah and Eastern Sea; Arabic also says Sea of Lot. Greeks and Romans sold its floating bitumen as Asphalt Lake; Tacitus mentioned a "Jewish Sea." Visitors have treated the shores as a health resort for millennia, while asphalt once served Egyptian mummification and potash still feeds fertiliser industries. Tourism continues on Israeli, Jordanian, and West Bank coasts.
Shrinkage is stark: surface area about 605 square kilometres now versus 1,050 in 1930. Canal schemes such as the cancelled Red Sea–Dead Sea Conveyance aimed to slow the fall. The basin sits on the Dead Sea Transform, a left-lateral fault along the boundary between the African and Arabian plates, and has no outlet. Besides the Jordan it receives smaller, often intermittent streams such as Wadi Arava from the south, Wadi Darga in the West Bank and Wadi al-Hasa in Jordan. Older English names include the Salt Sea and the Lake of Sodom, and Hebrew writing occasionally calls it the Sea of Death.
Source: Dead Sea
