Copyright timesofisrael
Every year, the Dead Sea loses 1.2 to 1.5 meters of depth. Do the math. At this rate, in twenty years what’s left will be little more than a hypersaline puddle surrounded by sinkholes and empty hotels. The southern basin? Already gone. Completely dried up. Hotels that used to draw tourists from around the world now stand empty, their swimming pools filled with wind-blown salt instead of healing water. The shoreline retreats so fast that roads built just five years ago lead nowhere — they end in cracked earth and crystallized brine. This isn’t some distant environmental crisis we can afford to study for another decade. This is happening right now. Measurably. Irreversibly. Unless we actually do something about it. THE ENGINEERING IS STRAIGHTFORWARD Here’s the thing: the solution doesn’t require breakthrough technology or massive desalination plants. We just need to work with physics instead of against it. From the Mediterranean at Haifa to the Dead Sea at Kalya, the terrain drops 430 meters. That’s almost half a kilometer of natural gradient. Which means water can flow under its own weight through about 140-kilometer canal following existing valleys — Wadi Ara, Jezreel Valley, Harod Valley, down through the Jordan Valley. No pumping stations burning energy 24/7. No complex underground tunnels that would take decades to build. Just an engineered channel letting gravity do what gravity does best: move water downhill. The flow rate needed to stabilize the sea’s level is about 80-115 cubic meters per second. That delivers 2.5 to 3 cubic kilometers annually, which matches the natural evaporation rate and replaces the freshwater we lost when the Jordan River was diverted for agriculture. TURNING NECESSITY INTO OPPORTUNITY But here’s where it gets interesting. That same 430-meter drop that lets water flow also creates a massive opportunity for clean energy. Two hydroelectric stations — at Beit She’an and Kalya, where the gradient is steepest — could generate 300 to 350 megawatts continuously. That’s roughly 2.9 terawatt-hours per year. Enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes. Think about that for a second. This isn’t just environmental restoration. It’s energy infrastructure that happens to save an ancient ecosystem. The economics? Annual energy revenue around $290 million at current Israeli electricity rates. Tourism recovery as the sea stabilizes: potentially $1-2 billion per year for the region. Total investment for construction: $3-4 billion. Payback period: about 12-15 years, and that’s before you even count tourism benefits. Compare this to the Red Sea-Dead Sea project that got shelved — that one was estimated at over $10 billion with permanent pumping costs that never end. They abandoned it because the economics didn’t work. THE ROUTE EXISTS IN THE LANDSCAPE The canal path isn’t some arbitrary line drawn across a map. It follows the natural topography that’s already there. Starting at Haifa Bay, the route traces Wadi Ara southeast into the Jezreel Valley. From there through the Harod Valley to Beit She’an, then down the Jordan Valley to reach the Dead Sea at Kalya. Where there are local high points — what engineers call elevation “saddles” — excavation would be 10 to 15 meters deep. That’s standard civil engineering. Not a megaproject. The canal would be about 21 meters wide at the bottom, roughly 2 meters deep, with flow velocity around 2.0 to 2.6 meters per second. These are proven, manageable numbers based on similar canals worldwide. And here’s what matters politically: the entire route stays within Israeli territory. That simplifies construction permissions, management, security. Yet the benefits cross borders — a stabilized Dead Sea serves tourism and industry on both the Israeli and Jordanian sides. BEYOND INFRASTRUCTURE Large infrastructure projects often become rallying points for regional cooperation. The Dead Sea restoration could do exactly that. Jordan faces severe water scarcity. Israel has world-class expertise in water management and energy systems. Europe and the Gulf states keep talking about Middle Eastern stability projects. The framework for international participation exists. What’s been missing is a concrete, technically solid proposal that people can actually rally around. This could be that proposal. Not because it’s some utopian peace plan, but because it’s practical. Not because it solves every regional tension, but because it addresses one specific problem with measurable engineering solutions. THE DATA SAYS YES. WHAT DO WE SAY? Look, the hydraulic calculations have been done. The route’s been mapped using publicly available elevation data. Energy generation potential has been modeled. The economic analysis shows positive returns within a reasonable timeframe. All the technical documentation is openly published on Zenodo — full methodology, calculations, everything available for peer review. The engineering community can verify these numbers, critique them, improve them. That’s how this stuff works. What you can’t model in advance is political will. You can’t calculate whether decision-makers in Jerusalem, Amman, Brussels, or Abu Dhabi will actually look at these numbers and say: “Okay. Let’s do this.” The Dead Sea has been around for millennia. It’s witnessed civilizations rise and fall. It contains unique microbial life that exists nowhere else on Earth. It’s given humanity salt, minerals, healing throughout recorded history. And now it’s asking us a pretty simple question: are we going to let it die while we commission yet another feasibility study? Or are we going to build the infrastructure that basic physics tells us will work? The engineering is ready. The economics work. The environmental benefits are obvious. What’s missing is just the decision to act. Full technical documentation for this proposal, including hydraulic calculations, route analysis, and economic modeling, is available at Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17582703. Website: https://sites.google.com/view/savedeadsea
