Dead Sea's Salt Giants Reveal How Massive Salt Deposits Form Over Time

The Dead Sea is a confluence of extraordinary conditions: the lowest point on Earth's surface, with one of the world's highest salinities. The high concentration of salt gives it a correspondingly high density, and the water body's status as the deepest hypersaline lake gives rise to interesting and often temperature-related phenomena below the water's surface that researchers are still uncovering.

One of the most intriguing features of the Dead Sea continues to be revealed: salt giants, large-scale salt deposits.

"These large deposits in Earth's crust can be many, many kilometers horizontally, and they can be more than a kilometer thick in the vertical direction," said UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineering professor Eckart Meiburg, lead author of a paper published in the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics. "How were they generated? The Dead Sea is really the only place in the world where we can study the mechanism of these things today."

Indeed, while there are other bodies of water in the world with massive salt formations, such as the Mediterranean and Red seas, only in the Dead Sea can one find them in the making, which allows researchers to tackle the physical processes behind their evolution, and in particular, the spatial and temporal variations in their thickness.