PHOTOS - "Towers" of salt at the bottom of the Dead Sea

2024-11-21 08:12:00, Kuriozitete CNA

There is something unique rising from the seabed of the Dead Sea, real constructions created by nature that have never been seen before anywhere on the planet. The discovery came thanks to an interdisciplinary research project coordinated by the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ).

The researchers discovered "towers" averaging one or two meters high, although some rise to around seven meters, which were and are still being formed by the spontaneous crystallization of minerals coming from water from aquifers that exist beneath the seabed. The water present in the aquifer has an extremely high salt content, as researchers report in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

The Dead Sea is a very dynamic system. The lake level has been falling by about one meter per year for more than 50 years because it has been cut off from the main tributaries and is therefore losing large amounts of water through increasingly intense evaporation. The surface then dropped to about 438 meters below sea level. Now it must be said that the level of the aquifers is decreasing significantly due to increasingly intensive human withdrawals, making it increasingly difficult for neighboring countries to access water from the aquifers themselves.

For many years, the UFZ hydrogeologist, Dr. Christian Siebert, studied how the dynamics of the groundwater system in this region are changing and how groundwater is finding new paths in rock layers both underground and under the Dead Sea. Recently, a group of divers discovered "towers" rising from the bottom of the sea that release a carbonated liquid.

Where does salt come from?

To understand the origin of salt it must be said that the waters of the surrounding aquifers once under the sea rise towards the sediments of the sea, leaching (leaching is a chemical process that takes chemical substances from the rocks penetrated by the water) extremely old and thick composed of mainly from the mineral halite (halite is the geological term for rock salt, the mineral composed of sodium chloride)

The danger of potholes.

White fumaroles are particularly important because they can serve as an early warning indicator of the formation of "towers". These are craters that form on the ground and can be up to 100 meters wide and up to 20 meters deep, thousands of which have been created along the Dead Sea in recent decades.

They are formed by the karstification of the subsoil, that is, by the dissolution of massive layers of salt present in the subsoil. This forms giant cavities on which the ground can collapse at any time./ CNA