The Dead Sea, one of the places in the world which have the most controversial origin. But recently, scientists have found evidence of a drought that happened hundred thousand years ago.
A 30-meter-thick crystalline salt has been brought by the drillers to the surface from the depths of 300 meters below the landlocked basin. The crystalline salt which was dated to be 120,000 years old has the evidence that 10,000 years ago, there had been a rainfall of only about a one-fifth of the modern rainfall levels today.
Based on the article published by The Guardian, humans living in the region of the Dead Sea already experienced the worst drought 900 years before. "All the observations show this region is one of the most affected by the modern climate change and it is predicted to get drier," Yael Kiro, a geochemist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in U.S., said. She also added that what they showed in their models can become much drier than predicted even under natural conditions.
The Dead Sea is the deepest hypersaline lake in the world bordered by Jordan to the east and Israel and Palestine to the west. It is one of the saltiest bodies of water. With 34.2 percent salinity, it is 9.6 times as salty as the ocean. Its surface and shores are 430.5 meters below sea level which make it the Earth's lowest elevation on land and it is the best site to study the past brought events in the Earth's history.
In 2010, a team of International researchers drilled almost 500 meters below the deepest part of the Dead Sea to look for evidence of past droughts that happened thousands of years ago. They gathered samples from the trapped water evaporated to precipitate deep and dense beds of salts.
Likewise, according to the Weather Network, the Middle East continues to dry and warm again with raising temperatures. Researchers feared that it could cause the scientific community to rethink the impact of such event and how much worse drought conditions could become.
The research team also suggest that at some point the drought happened between the Ice Ages roughly 115,000 years ago. During this time, Earth's average atmospheric temperature reaches to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit or 4 degrees Celsius compared to the average temperature in the 20th century. Scientist predicts that this increase in temperature will be roughly the same to happen if humans continue to burn fossil fuels at the same rate.
