Our Daily News Letter

“The Dead Sea is the sink-hole of the world”, says a bulletin from the Washington, D. C., headquarters of the National Geographic Society. In no other continent is there such a deep depression in the earth’s crust! nor will one find greater desolation or more uncomfortable conditions for man and most other living things even in the hearts of the greatest deserts.

The Hebrew scriptures have thrown an atmosphere of tragedy about this country. There, the chronicle states, were situated the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrha, destroyed by the wrath of Jehovah; and there the modern reader sees the blasted region, seared by unbearable heat, with its bitter death-dealing waters, to prove the story to his satisfaction.

According to the Biblical narrative the Jordan Valley, and the plain near its mouth on the shores of the Dead Sea where the destroyed cities lay, shard the early good fortune of the Promised Land itself and “flowed with milk and honey.” But an end was put to this pleasant condition by the rain of brimstone and fire.

The story of the region deciphered from its rocks by geologists begins much earlier than the days of the patriarchs whose actions are recorded in the Bible. This record seems to indicate that Palestine and the whole western end of Arabia rose from the sea a million or more years ago in what geologists term the Tertiary era. Shortly after the rise, it seems, a great slice of the land parallel to the coast of the Mediterranean sank to great depth, forming the huge rift valley, “the Ghor,” now occupied by the Jordan River and the Dead Sea.

It is not clear whether there was a connecting channel between the Mediterranean and the great valley; but a well defined ancient beach indicates that in those remote times the great depression held a sea or lake at about the same level as that of the Mediterranean. The Jordan did not then exist; its entire valley as well as the Sea of Galilee was swallowed up in the parent of the Dead Sea, which was some 200 miles long and 10 to 15 miles wide.

The Dead Sea depression having no outlet, all the salts contained in the large original inland sea were retained when evaporation reduced the volume of the body of water to its present dimensions. In addition, for hundreds of thousands of years the Jordan and the other streams and torrents that flow from the desert hills into the basin have been carrying in additional salts until now the waters of the Dead Sea constitute one of the most highly concentrated natural brines in existence. It is estimated that on the average some six million tons of water flow into the Dead Sea daily, and since the level of the sea changes but little, an equal amount is pumped out daily by evaporation.

The present Dead Sea is 47 miles long and about 10 miles wide. Its surface lies approximately 1,300 feet lower than sea level and at its deepest point its bottom lies another 1,300 feet down. This great rift in the earth’s crust, therefore, lies 2,600 feet below sea level and is the deepest hole in the had anywhere in the world. Because of the intense heat and dryness and the presence everywhere of salt the land immediately about the Dead Sea is a region of desolation. On some of the last a few straggling, thorny desert plants grow and in some sheltered wadies where the springs are fresh, small groups of palms struggle for existence. Most of the area, however, is a dry rocky waste encrusted with salt, or nearer the ##, with slimy salt mud flats.

It is quite possible that even six or seven thousand years ago, in the era to which the Biblical chronicles reach, the then relatively moist climate of Palestine made the plain near the mouth of the Jordan a rich land such as that which Lot found. It is also quite possible that the “Cities of the Plain”-Sodom, Gomorrha, and the others-perished in a cataclysm brought about by a modern secondary adjustment in this region of tremendous earlier geologic disturbance.

Because the intense heat and pressure are almost sure to prove fatal to others than the few hapless Arab nomads that manage to survive in the region, this area has not been intensively studied by scientists. It was at first thought that there is no evidence of recent volcanic action and that the traditional destruction of the cities by a rain of fire and brimstone may have referred to the explosion of pockets of crude petroleum. A scientist who visited the region in 1919, however, reported a small extinct volcano near the northeastern corner of the Dead Sea near the reputed site of Sodom and concluded that a shower of ashes from this vent may have caused the catastrophe so vividly described in Genesis.