The Dead Sea has a salinity of about 30 percent, but in some parts of the enormous salt lake, extremely salty water flows from the ground. There, meter-high chimneys are created because the minerals crystallize.
The chimneys, called ‘white smokers’, are an important warning indicator of collapsing craters, as scientists from the Leipzig Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ) have now discovered.
These craters arise in the area around the Dead Sea and pose a danger to the population. As the research team reported in the journal Science of the Total Environment, the chimneys formed wherever the land surface subsequently sank over a large area.
The Dead Sea is sinking one meter per year
According to UFZ information, the Dead Sea has been sinking about one meter per year for more than 50 years because it is cut off from important tributaries and loses a lot of water due to heavy evaporation due to drought and heat. The water level is currently about 438 meters below sea level. According to the researchers, this means that neighboring countries are finding it increasingly difficult to access groundwater supplies.
The scientists discovered that highly saline groundwater flows out through the chimneys at the bottom of the lake. Because this brine (this is what an aqueous solution of salts is called) has a slightly lower density than the water of the Dead Sea, it rises like a jet.
Chimneys reach a height of more than seven meters
“It looks like smoke, but it is a salty liquid,” explains hydrogeologist Christian Siebert. Some of these chimneys are more than seven meters high and have a diameter of two to three meters. The ‘white smokers’ make it possible to predict very well which areas are at risk of collapse in the near future, Siebert explains.
The chimneys could be mapped very precisely using autonomous watercraft. “This would be the only and at the same time very efficient way to identify regions on the verge of collapse as in acute danger,” Siebert emphasized.
Source: Krone
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