Why is the Dead Sea disappearing?

Its water is taken before it arrives. The Jordan is the only significant river feeding it and there is no outflow, so the level is set entirely by inflow against evaporation - and Israel, Jordan and Syria now divert the great majority of the Jordan for drinking and agriculture. What reaches the sea is a fraction of the historic flow. Potash works on both shores evaporate more of it deliberately.

The surface has dropped by more than thirty metres since the 1960s and continues to fall over a metre a year. It is already the lowest exposed land on Earth at around 430 metres below sea level, and it is going down.

The retreat is doing something unexpected and dangerous. Thick layers of salt were laid down under the old shoreline; as the water withdraws, fresh groundwater moves in and dissolves them, leaving cavities that collapse without warning. Thousands of sinkholes have opened along the shore, swallowing roads, date plantations and buildings, and beach resorts built at the waterline in the 1980s now sit well inland behind fenced-off ground.