100 Fun Facts About Dead Sea

Despite its name, what kind of body of water is the Dead Sea?

The Dead Sea is a landlocked salt lake: it fills an endorheic basin with no outlet, so water leaves only by evaporation, which concentrates its salts.

Which country borders the Dead Sea on its eastern shore?

Jordan lines the whole eastern shore of the Dead Sea, while Israel and the West Bank lie along the western side.

What is the Dead Sea's main tributary?

The Jordan River, flowing south from the Sea of Galilee, enters the Dead Sea at its northern end and is by far its largest inflow.

As of 2025, roughly how far below sea level is the surface of the Dead Sea?

The surface stood about 440 metres below sea level in 2025, making its shores the lowest land on Earth; the level has been dropping by roughly a metre a year.

Compared with ordinary seawater, the Dead Sea is roughly how much saltier?

About tenfold: the Dead Sea's salinity measured 34.2% in 2011, nearly ten times the roughly 35 grams of salt per litre found in ordinary seawater.

Why can anyone float effortlessly in the Dead Sea?

The water's high density, about 1.24 kg per litre, buoys a human body far more strongly than ordinary seawater does.

How deep is the Dead Sea at its deepest point?

The Dead Sea reaches about 304 metres at its deepest point, which makes it the deepest hypersaline lake in the world.

Why is the lake called 'dead'?

Its salinity prevents fish and plants living in it; only tiny quantities of bacteria and microbial fungi survive in the brine.

The Dead Sea's surface area shrank from 1,050 sq km in 1930 to about how much by the 2020s?

By the 2020s the lake covered about 605 sq km, down from 1,050 sq km in 1930, as its level fell by more than a metre a year.

The oldest and most common Hebrew name for the lake translates as what?

Yam HaMelah, 'Sea of Salt', is the lake's name in Genesis 14:3 and remains its everyday name in modern Hebrew.

Ancient Greek and Roman geographers usually named the lake after which substance that floated on it?

Lacus Asphaltites reflected a large trade in the free-floating bitumen the lake still spits up from deep seeps.

The Arabic name 'Sea of Lot' refers to whose nephew?

Lot was the nephew of Abraham; Genesis has him part from his uncle and settle in the well-watered plain beside the lake.

Which UNESCO site just north of the lake is venerated as the place of Jesus's baptism?

Al-Maghtas, on the river's east bank about 9 km north of the lake, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2015 as the traditional baptism site of Jesus.

The Dead Sea lies on the boundary between which two tectonic plates?

The African and Arabian plates meet along the Dead Sea Transform, which runs from Turkey's East Anatolian Fault south to the Gulf of Aqaba.

Which ridge of halite rises along the lake's south-western shore?

Mount Sodom is a ridge of rock salt: overlying sediment squeezed ancient salt beds upward, leaving the halite standing as cliffs above the shore.

Geologists call the ancient Mediterranean inlet that once flooded the Dead Sea valley what?

The Sedom Lagoon reached inland from the Mediterranean through the present-day Jezreel Valley, and its repeated evaporation left thick beds of rock salt beneath the valley floor.

The Dead Sea is the last remnant of a much larger prehistoric body of water known by what name?

Lake Lisan filled the valley during the last ice age, standing up to about 250 metres higher than the present lake before it shrank to the Dead Sea.

What Köppen climate type does the Dead Sea have?

Hot desert (Köppen BWh): the shores receive only a few centimetres of rain a year and average 192 days above 30 °C.

Compared with sea level, the air at the Dead Sea has a slightly higher content of what?

Oxygen: the denser air more than 400 metres below sea level delivers about 5 percent more oxygen per breath, which eases breathing for people with reduced lung function.

Which metal's chloride makes up about half of the Dead Sea's dissolved salt, unlike the ocean's sodium salt?

Early-1980s analysis put magnesium chloride at 50.8% and sodium chloride at just 30.4%; the ocean's salt is about 85% sodium chloride.

The Dead Sea has the highest concentration of which ion of any water on Earth?

Bromide: Dead Sea brine holds around 5 grams of bromide per litre, far above any ocean or other lake, which is why a bromine industry grew up on its shores.

What happened to the Dead Sea's water column in the winter of 1978-79?

The upper layer had become saltier than the lower one; once it cooled and grew denser, the lake overturned into a single homogeneous body.

After a rainy winter in 1980, the Dead Sea briefly turned which colour?

Red: a rainy winter diluted the surface brine, letting algae bloom and feed red-pigmented halobacteria that tinted the whole lake.

At its widest, roughly how many kilometres across is the Dead Sea?

The Dead Sea is only about 15 km across at its widest point, a narrow ribbon of water hemmed in by the steep walls of the rift valley.

The Dead Sea's reduced ultraviolet light is used in photoclimatherapy for which skin condition?

Psoriasis: the extra 400 metres of atmosphere filter out much of the burning UVB, so psoriasis patients can sunbathe for long stretches with less risk.

According to Genesis, which two cities destroyed by fire from heaven stood near the Dead Sea?

Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by brimstone and fire in Genesis 19; Zoar, where Lot fled, was spared, and Admah and Zeboiim also counted among the Cities of the Plain.

Where near the Dead Sea was King David said to have hidden from Saul?

Ein Gedi: 1 Samuel 24 places David in the oasis's caves while Saul pursued him; the spring-fed site later grew famous for its balsam perfume.

Which people monopolised the Dead Sea's trade in the Hellenistic period?

The Nabateans, the Arab traders based at Petra, dominated commerce on the lake in the Hellenistic period; anchorages survive on both shores, including a Hasmonean-era dry dock at Khirbet Mazin.

Which king built the famous fortress of Masada on the Dead Sea's western shore?

Herod the Great built Masada's palaces and walls between about 37 and 31 BCE; the fortress later sheltered the Sicarii during the revolt against Rome.

Per Josephus, how many Masada defenders died by suicide when the Roman siege ended in 73/74 CE?

Josephus puts the dead at 960 men, women and children; the Sicarii had seized the fortress early in the revolt and held out after the Temple fell in 70 CE.

How did the Roman commander Vespasian test the Dead Sea's buoyancy in 68 CE?

Josephus records that he threw bound captives who could not swim into it and watched them bob on the surface; the Qumran settlement was destroyed around the same time.

Which ascetic Jewish sect settled at Qumran on the Dead Sea's western shore?

The Essenes, described by Josephus and Pliny as a celibate, communal sect, are widely identified with the Qumran settlement whose library became the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in caves near Qumran between 1946 and which year?

The last of the eleven scroll caves, Cave 11, was found in 1956; Bedouin shepherd Muhammed edh-Dhib had made the first discovery in late 1946 or early 1947.

Which Israel Museum building in Jerusalem houses the major Dead Sea Scrolls?

The Shrine of the Book, opened in 1965 under a white dome shaped like a scroll-jar lid, displays the great intact scrolls; most other manuscripts survive only as thousands of fragments.

Masada's 2001 UNESCO listing cites the most complete surviving example of what?

Its Roman siege works, the attack ramp and eight legionary camps, are the most complete Roman siege installations surviving anywhere, and UNESCO's 2001 citation singles them out.

The Madaba Map's cargo boats show that trade across the Dead Sea flourished during which period?

Byzantine: the mosaic map, laid in a Madaba church in the sixth century, shows two boats hauling cargo on the lake, evidence of busy trade in that era.

Which crop was cultivated on the Dead Sea's shores from the Crusader period, peaking under the Mamluks?

Sugarcane: Crusader and then Mamluk landowners ran irrigated cane fields and sugar mills at the lake's southern end, in the Ghor es-Safi, before the industry collapsed.

Which US naval officer led an 1848 boat expedition down the river into the Dead Sea?

William Francis Lynch led a US Navy party that sailed two metal boats down the river to the lake in 1848 and charted its depths.

In 1883 experts declared the 'Shapira Strips', a supposedly ancient scroll, to be what?

Forgeries was the verdict of the British Museum's experts in 1883; Moses Wilhelm Shapira, already linked to fake antiquities, shot himself in Rotterdam the next year.

The Palestine Potash Company supplied half of which country's potash in World War II?

Britain drew half its wartime potash from the Palestine Potash Company's two plants at either end of the lake; founder Moses Novomeysky had first visited in 1911.

In 1968 the Dead Sea Works became a subsidiary of which state-founded holding company?

Israel Chemicals was set up in 1968 as a state holding company for the Dead Sea Works and its sister mineral firms, and passed to private control in 1995.

The Dead Sea has been shrinking rapidly since the 1960s mainly because of what?

Diversion of its main river: Israel's National Water Carrier, finished in 1964, and later dams upstream cut the inflow from about 1.2 billion cubic metres a year to a small fraction of that.

What is causing the large sinkholes appearing along the Dead Sea's western shore?

As the lake drops, brine drains from underground layers, freshwater rushes in and dissolves the salt, and the cavities collapse; most northern beach resorts have had to close.

The plan to refill the Dead Sea with brine piped from which body of water was abandoned in 2021?

Red Sea: the 180 km pipeline from near Aqaba would have desalinated seawater for drinking and sent the leftover brine on to the lake; the scheme never broke ground.

Which alga bloomed in the Dead Sea after the rainy winter of 1980, feeding halobacteria?

Dunaliella, a salt-tolerant green alga, bloomed when rain diluted the surface brine, and carotenoid-rich halobacteria multiplied by feeding on it, tinting the water.

What did scuba-diving scientists discover in the Dead Sea floor in 2011?

Freshwater fissures ringed by microbes: divers found springs gushing from craters on the lake bed, their rims coated in biofilms of bacteria and archaea despite the extreme salinity.

Where are most of Israel's Dead Sea hotels concentrated?

Ein Bokek, on the southern shore, holds Israel's main hotel strip: more than a dozen resorts line a six-kilometre stretch beside the evaporation-pond basin.

Which mineral do the two Dead Sea potash firms harvest from evaporation pans before refining it?

Carnallite crystallises in the pans that have diked the whole southern end of the lake, split by a dike along the international border, and is then refined into potash.

From which mountain east of the lake did Moses view the Promised Land before dying?

Deuteronomy 34 has Moses climb Mount Nebo, overlooking the lake's northern end, to see the land before his death; a memorial church built in late antiquity crowns the summit.

Which numbered highway follows the Dead Sea's western shore on its way from Metula to Eilat?

Route 90, Israel's longest road, runs the length of the country and hugs the lake's western shore; Highway 65 does the same job on the eastern side.

Which Greek philosopher wrote of a 'fabled' lake in Palestine where neither man nor beast sinks?

Aristotle's Meteorology reports the tale, adding that the water was so bitter no fish lived in it and that clothes shaken in it came out clean.

Which Antarctic water body, at roughly 44% salinity, dwarfs the Dead Sea for saltiness?

Don Juan Pond, a shallow pool in Antarctica's Wright Valley, is so rich in calcium chloride that it stays liquid far below freezing, with salinity over 40 percent.

What did the British build at Kalia and name after two doomed biblical cities?

A golf course, run by a jokily named Mandate-era golfing society, sat beside the Kalia hotel and the potash company's first plant, which began production there in 1931.

'Sodomite salt' flavoured Temple incense but was said to be risky at home, causing what?

Blindness: the Talmud warns that a grain of Sodomite salt left on the fingers could blind the eyes, the reason it gives for washing hands after meals.

Which prophet's book foretells that the sea will 'be healed and made fresh'?

Ezekiel 47 describes a river flowing from the Temple down to the sea, whose waters 'shall be healed' and teem with fish; Zechariah 14:8 has a similar vision.

During the First Temple period, which kingdom held the Dead Sea's eastern shore?

Moab held the eastern shore, with its capital at Dibon; Judah ruled the western side and the Edomites lay to the south.

Which eastern-shore hot springs did Josephus say a dying king visited for a cure?

Josephus writes that the ailing king crossed to Callirrhoe, where warm springs run into the lake's eastern shore, hoping its waters would ease his final illness.

Which Judaean Desert monastery, founded in 483, overlooks the Kidron Valley south-east of Jerusalem?

Mar Saba was founded in 483 by Saint Sabbas in the Kidron gorge and has been occupied by monks ever since; Saint George's in Wadi Qelt is the other famous survivor.

The Dead Sea's aridity is blamed on the rain shadow of which range?

The Judaean Mountains to the west wring out the Mediterranean rain, leaving the lake in their shadow; the highlands east of it get more rain than the shore does.

How long is the Dead Sea's main northern basin?

The main northern basin stretches about 50 km from north to south, and a shoreline of roughly 135 km wraps the whole lake.

The salt hill on the lake's south-western shore rises by roughly how much a year?

Rock salt beneath the hill keeps flowing upward under the weight of the valley's sediments, lifting it about 3.5 mm a year; it is roughly 80% salt, capped by limestone, clay and conglomerate.

The peninsula dividing the lake's two basins is named from the Arabic for what?

Tongue is what the peninsula's Arabic name means; like the salt hill across the water, it is mostly white calcareous marl laced with salt and gypsum.

Explorer Christopher Costigan, honoured by a cape on the lake, died in 1835 from what?

Heat and thirst felled Costigan after his drinking water ran out in the August sun; he died days later in Jerusalem, while Molyneux's 1847 voyage ended with his death from fever.

Which Crusader lord of Kerak, east of the lake, did Saladin execute after Hattin in 1187?

Raynald of Châtillon ruled Oultrejordain from Kerak, raiding caravans on the plateau above the lake; Saladin beheaded him personally after the Battle of Hattin in 1187.

Which village on the lake's north-eastern shore hosts the eastern side's luxury hotel strip?

Sweimeh, on the north-eastern shore, grew a strip of five-star resorts from the late 1990s and hosts the convention centre used for the World Economic Forum's regional meetings.

What record-holding device sits at Ein Bokek, 421 metres below sea level?

A cash machine: a grocery store at the resort installed it on its own initiative, and at 421 metres below sea level it ranks as the lowest ATM on Earth.

Which Israeli desert town, founded in 1962, is the western gateway to the lake's hotels?

Arad was planned in 1962 as a model desert town on the heights above the lake's south-western shore, about 25 km from the resort strip by road.

Wadi Mujib, Jordan's canyon river into the lake, was known in the Bible as which stream?

Arnon: the Bible names this gorge as the frontier between the kingdoms east of the lake, and King Mesha's ninth-century stele boasts of building a road along it.

Which Hasmonean king originally built the fortress of Machaerus above the eastern shore?

Alexander Jannaeus raised Machaerus in the early first century BCE; Pompey's general Gabinius wrecked it in 57 BCE, and it was rebuilt about 30 BCE as a royal fortress guarding the eastern frontier.

Ahava's founding idea came after a spa technician watched women tourists doing what?

Scooping up mud: Ziva Gilad saw visitors carrying the black mineral mud home, and in 1988 her kibbutz partners launched Ahava with a single stand selling body scrub.

Which Chinese conglomerate agreed to buy a controlling stake in Ahava in 2015?

Fosun International, the Shanghai-based conglomerate behind Club Med, agreed in 2015 to buy Ahava from its kibbutz and investor owners, completing the deal the following year.

Ahava's main factory, a target of boycott campaigns, stood at which West Bank kibbutz?

Mitzpe Shalem, a kibbutz on the north-western shore inside the West Bank, housed the factory and held a stake in the company; Ahava's London shop closed in 2011 after constant protests.

How many hiding places for treasure does the Copper Scroll list?

The 64 entries describe caches of gold and silver; one alone lists 900 talents of silver, and the last entry points to a duplicate copy of the list, itself never located.

The corroded Copper Scroll was cut into 23 strips in 1955–56 in which English city?

At the Manchester College of Science and Technology, Professor H. Wright Baker sawed the oxidised scroll into strips on John Allegro's recommendation, and Allegro transcribed the text as the segments came apart.

Unlike most of the scrolls, the Copper Scroll has been displayed since 2013 in which city?

It was one of the few finds still in Jordanian hands in 1967, having been kept in Amman rather than at East Jerusalem's Palestine Archaeological Museum.

Which book of the Hebrew Bible is the only one not found among the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Esther is absent from all eleven caves; one theory holds that Qumran's calendar had no place for Purim, another that a Jewish queen wed to a Persian king was frowned upon.

The Bedouin finders sold three of the first scrolls to a dealer for how much?

A Bethlehem dealer paid 7 Jordanian pounds, about $28, for the three scrolls; in 1954 four of the scrolls changed hands for $250,000.

In June 1954, four Dead Sea Scrolls were advertised for sale in which newspaper?

The Wall Street Journal ran the 'Four Dead Sea Scrolls' advert on 1 June 1954; Yigael Yadin arranged their purchase through an intermediary for $250,000 and took them to Jerusalem.

The rare red ink on the Dead Sea Scrolls was made from which mineral?

Cinnabar, mercury sulphide, gave the rare coloured ink found in only four places across the collection; the black ink was lamp soot thinned with honey, oil, vinegar or water.

Which numbered Qumran cavern yielded about 90% of all the scroll fragments?

Cave 4, found by Bedouin in 1952 across the gully from the Qumran ruins, held roughly 15,000 fragments from some 500 texts, including nine or ten copies of Jubilees.

At over eight metres, which is the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls?

The Temple Scroll, from Cave 11, runs to more than eight metres; over half of it concerns building the Jerusalem Temple, and Yigael Yadin regarded it as the sect's own Torah.

Mar Samuel, who acquired four of the first scrolls, was a Metropolitan of which church?

Syriac Orthodox: Mar Athanasius Samuel was the church's Metropolitan in Jerusalem, based at St Mark's Monastery, where a go-between brought the strange texts for appraisal.

From 1993, which US agency's imaging revealed illegible text on scroll fragments?

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory adapted multispectral imaging from its planetary probes, photographing the fragments at specific infrared wavelengths to reveal writing invisible to the eye.

In 2020, which US institution admitted all 16 of its scroll fragments were forgeries?

The Museum of the Bible in Washington announced in March 2020 that independent analysis found all 16 of its fragments to be modern fakes inked onto old leather; it had bought them between 2009 and 2014.

Before the scrolls, which codex was among the oldest known Hebrew Bible manuscripts?

The Aleppo Codex, a tenth-century Masoretic manuscript, was among the oldest Hebrew Bible texts known until the scrolls pushed the record back a thousand years and showed how little the text had changed.

Khalil 'Kando' Shahin, the Bethlehem dealer behind the first scrolls, was by trade a what?

A cobbler: Kando ran a shoe-repair shop in Bethlehem and dealt in antiquities on the side; a sheikh at the market sent the Bedouin to him after another dealer dismissed the scrolls.

Which Roman governor led the Tenth Legion's siege of Masada?

Lucius Flavius Silva, governor of Judaea, brought the Tenth Legion with auxiliaries and thousands of Jewish prisoners as labourers against Masada, after his predecessor Bassus had reduced Machaerus.

Geologists found the Roman assault ramp at Masada consists mostly of what?

A natural spur of bedrock forms most of the ramp: geologist Dan Gill showed in 2001 that the Romans only topped an existing rock rib with fill, far less earthwork than legend suggests.

Despite Josephus's suicide tale, remains of at most how many people were found at Masada?

Only 28 sets of remains were found: three in the northern palace and 25 in a cave below the southern wall, where pig bones hint they may have been Romans rather than rebels.

A 2,000-year-old date seed from Masada was sprouted and nicknamed after which patriarch?

Methuselah, sprouted in 2005 by Sarah Sallon and Elaine Solowey, grew into a male Judean date palm; its seed had lain in the fortress storerooms since the first century.

Which IDF chief of staff began swearing in armoured corps recruits atop Masada?

Moshe Dayan, chief of staff in the mid-1950s, started the ceremony: recruits climbed the Snake Path by night and ended the torchlit rite with the vow 'Masada shall not fall again'.

Which electronic musician staged a concert beside Masada in 2017?

Jean-Michel Jarre played a laser-lit show at the foot of Masada on 6 April 2017, using the cliff face as a backdrop; the fortress has also served as the main setting of the novel The Dovekeepers.

In 1900 the PEF carved a line into a rock at Ein Feshkha to track what?

The Dead Sea's water level was the PEF's target: its mark was read against the lake twice a year until 1913, recording a surface then far above the present shoreline.

Ein Feshkha's wetlands are the only place where two species of which fish live together?

Killifish: the reserve's springs hold both the blue killifish and the endemic Dead Sea killifish, and breeding pools were dug to protect them; it is also a griffon-vulture Important Bird Area.

Excavator Roland de Vaux identified Qumran with which place listed in the Book of Joshua?

Others prefer Secacah from the same verse, since the Copper Scroll's description of Secacah's waterworks matches Qumran's cisterns.

The Jordan Valley segment of the Dead Sea fault last had a major earthquake in which year?

The 1033 earthquake was the last great rupture of the valley segment north of the lake; the slip accumulated since makes it a recognised seismic gap, while 1068, 1212 and 1458 struck the Wadi Arabah segment to the south.

What kind of motion characterises the Dead Sea Transform fault?

Left-lateral slip: from either bank the opposite block moves to the left, because the eastern block has crept about 107 km north relative to the western block since the Miocene.

19th-century British officers first imagined linking the seas to bypass what?

The Suez Canal, then only planned, was the rival: in 1855 Captain William Allen proposed flooding the rift valley to create a 'new route to India' through the lake.

The scrapped Two Seas Canal to the Dead Sea was priced at roughly how much?

About $10 billion for the full scheme: seawater would have been pumped 230 metres uphill from the coast before dropping to the lake, with the first phase alone costed at $1.1 billion.

The Early Bronze Age cemetery at Bab edh-Dhra is estimated to hold how many shaft tombs?

Some 20,000 shaft tombs, holding perhaps half a million bodies, make it one of the largest Early Bronze Age cemeteries known; later residents switched to mudbrick charnel houses dubbed 'body libraries'.