The English name "Dead Sea" is a calque borrowed through Arabic, Greek, and Latin -- all describing the same observation: almost nothing lives here. With salinity around 34.2 percent, the water is hostile to fish, aquatic plants, and most microorganisms. The Hebrew Bible calls it the Salt Sea. The Talmud uses the name Sea of Sodom. In Arabic it is al-Bahr al-Mayyit, the Dead Sea, though it is also known as the Lake of Lot, after the nephew of Abraham whose wife was said to have turned into a pillar of salt during the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The lake sits bordered by Jordan to the east, the West Bank to the west, and Israel to the southwest. Its main northern basin stretches 50 kilometers long and 15 kilometers wide at its broadest point, fed primarily by the Jordan River from the north. What enters does not leave, except by evaporation -- and in this desert climate, evaporation wins.

Two competing hypotheses explain how the Dead Sea came to occupy the lowest continental depression on Earth. The older theory holds that it lies in a true rift zone, an extension of the Red Sea Rift and the Great Rift Valley system stretching from East Africa. A more recent model proposes that the basin formed through a "step-over" discontinuity along the Dead Sea Transform fault, where the crust stretched and subsided. During the late Pliocene and early Pleistocene, the valley was repeatedly flooded by waters from the Mediterranean, forming what geologists call the Sedom Lagoon. As the connection to the Mediterranean was eventually severed, the trapped water evaporated under the desert sun, concentrating the minerals that give the Dead Sea its character. The result is a brew rich in magnesium, potassium, and bromine -- chemically distinct from ordinary seawater and commercially valuable enough to support extraction industries on both the Israeli and Jordanian shores.

The sea is called dead, but it is not entirely so. In 1980, after an unusually rainy winter dropped the salinity from its typical 35 percent to around 30 percent, researchers from Hebrew University of Jerusalem watched the normally dark blue water turn red. The cause was Dunaliella, a salt-tolerant alga, which in turn fed carotenoid-containing halobacteria whose red pigment transformed the lake's color. The bloom was temporary. Since 1980, the southern basin has dried out entirely, and the algae have not returned in measurable numbers. In 2011, researchers discovered freshwater springs on the lake floor, supporting biofilms of bacteria and archaea thriving in the narrow zone where fresh water meets brine. These microbial communities suggest that life finds its margins even in the most extreme environments -- though calling the Dead Sea alive would be a generous stretch of the term.

The Dead Sea has lost roughly a third of its surface area since the 1960s. The primary cause is human: Israel, Jordan, and Syria divert water from the Jordan River and its tributaries for agriculture and drinking water, reducing the inflow that once sustained the lake's level. Mineral extraction operations on both shores pump brine into evaporation ponds, accelerating the loss. The southern basin, once part of the lake, is now entirely industrial. As the water level drops -- by approximately one meter per year -- thousands of sinkholes have opened along the retreating shoreline, swallowing roads, date palm groves, and sections of tourist infrastructure. The Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance project, proposed jointly by Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority, aimed to pipe water from the Gulf of Aqaba to stabilize the lake while generating hydroelectric power and desalinated water. The project has faced decades of feasibility studies, environmental concerns, and political complications. The Dead Sea continues to shrink while the plans continue to evolve.

People have been drawn to the Dead Sea for as long as recorded history reaches. The Egyptians used its bitumen for mummification. Herod the Great built a winter palace at its shore. The Essenes, a Jewish ascetic sect, settled at Qumran on its northwestern bank, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in caves in 1947 -- one of the most important archaeological finds of the twentieth century. Cleopatra is said to have coveted the lake's mineral rights. Today, tourism and health industries cluster along both shores: the mineral-rich mud and water draw visitors seeking treatments for psoriasis and other skin conditions, while the increased atmospheric pressure at such extreme low elevation may benefit respiratory ailments. But the resorts sit on borrowed time. Hotels that once overlooked the water now stand hundreds of meters from its edge. The Dead Sea is a place that has always seemed permanent -- ancient, biblical, geologically fundamental -- and the discovery that it is not may be the most unsettling thing about it.