All Headline News recently published an article about the Dead Sea and the thousands of people who visit it each year for all-natural salt therapy. The water there is “so salty that swimmers can float without little effort and read the newspaper” and many people have found relief from a variety of ailments by just soaking in the water or resting on the shores.
The key point of the article, though, is that the Dead Sea is drying up. At 422 meters below sea level, it is already one of the lowest spots in the world. The sea has dropped about 25 meters in the last 33 years, and this year it is 1.3 meters lower than it was a year ago, and it is thought that it could drop another 130 meters, which would reduce it to the size of a small lake (causing it to evaporate quickly due to all of the saltiness). One proposal to reduce the trend is to increase the inflow by digging a trench to the Mediterranean or the Red Sea, but the cost is thought to be massive.
The article then goes on to describe speleotherapy (salt room therapy) now being offered by the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem.