Aral Sea May Recover; Dead Sea Needs a Lifeline

An anonymous reader writes "It's a tale of two seas. The drying up of the Aral Sea is considered one of the greatest environmental catastrophes in history, but the northern sector of the sea, at least, is showing signs of life. A dam completed in 2005 has increased the North Aral's span by 20 percent, and birds, fish, and people are all returning to the area. Meanwhile, the Dead Sea is still in the midst of precipitous decline, since too much water is being drawn out of the Jordan River for thirsty populations and crops. To keep the sea from shrinking more, scientists are pushing an ambitious scheme called the 'Red-Dead conduit,' which would channel huge amounts of water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. However, the environmental consequences of such a project may be troubling."

Comments

Re:If not us, who?

[Mindcontrolled]

It is hard to know. Craig Venter has a project running to sequence random stuff from seawater. I haven't been following it lately, but it seems like there is a metric shitload of bacterial species in ordinary seawater that we had no clue about before. We really just scratched the surface regarding microbial life. Getting as many sequences as possible sure is a worthwhile preservation effort if all else fails. Note, however, that we still can't reconstruct a species from DNA sequence alone. So you gotta keep some cultures at least, and extremophiles like the Dead Sea bacteria are notoriously hard to culture. It's more alchemy than science to keep the little buggers at life. Back when I was still working in a biochem lab, the microbio guys kept joking that you don't need a microbiologist to culture them well, you need a micropsychologist to make the little bastards do want you want them too ...

Re:If not us, who?

[FatdogHaiku]

A little reading shows that it only barely became hospitable to microorganisms a few times when massive rains diluted the salt temporarily... Animals that live around it do not get water from it for the same reason, they need rain water and river water, not more salt... And adding salt water to saturated salt water does not reduce the net saline for long because so much salt is dried on the banks or fallen out of solution... sitting there just waiting to redissolve.

It is tempting to want to "save" things from natural effects of modern life, people are using the water so people should fix it. But once that water entered the dead sea, it too died, better it be used for something. In the end this is just as big a waste of money as trying to protect a city that is below sea level but situated by the ocean... one day it will be game over.

As to a tourist destination, well they could Monty Python the signs and call it:

The Really Dead Sea