Living Dead (Sea)

Israel and Jordan have unveiled a scheme to save the rapidly shrinking Dead Sea, one which has been feeding the unfounded-rumor mill for years. The plan is a lot more complicated from the political angle than the engineering angle. The cost is quoted at $800 million, and would involve laying a pipe from the Gulf of Aqaba 300 miles across the desert to the Dead Sea, which is 400 feet below sea level. The highest elevation in the valley between the two is, I believe, 300 feet, so the pipe, once it starts flowing, can easily siphon water from the Gulf to the Sea with no pumping. My father, the engineer, said it'll be up to the designing engineers to figure out the friction coefficient and make sure that the height drop will overcome that and maintain a steady rate of flow.

The politics isn't that cut and dried. On the bureaucratic level, Israel and Jordan don't have as much experience in cooperation as most neighboring countries, and will have to deal with giving out contracts, locating the pipeline, and other potentially thorny issues jointly. That, however, is a challenge I think the Israeli-Jordanian relationship can ultimately overcome, and this project could benefit both politically as well as environmentally: high-profile cooperation sure can't hurt in the rest of the world's eyes! However, one part of the rest of the world might not be so thrilled, and that's the main political danger involved: if the other Arab states and Jordan's Palestinian majority pressure King Abdullah enough, he may be forced to put the project on hold periodically to "punish" the Israelis. Jordan would be harmed more, but the project has the potential to become just another symbol of the breakdown of the Arab-Israeli peace process. A classical tragedy it would be if two sides claiming rights to holy land ended up destroying that very land by their bickering after peace had seemed so close.