Landslides along the Jordanian Dead Sea coast triggered by the lake level lowering

Abstract

The level of the Dead Sea lowers 1 m/year and this rate is in acceleration. The decline is causing one of the major environmental disasters of the twenty-first century. The freshwater resources management policy of Israel, Jordan, and Palestine controls the phenomenon. Since the 1960s, the level of this terminal lake dropped by 28 m and its surface shrunk by one-third. In the 1990s, international builders created major tourist resorts and industrial plants along the Jordanian shore while, during the same period, geological hazards triggered by the level lowering spread out. From the very beginning of the year 2000, sinkholes, subsidence, landslides, and river erosion damaged infrastructures more and more frequently: dikes, bridges, roads, houses, factories, pipes, crops, etc. Until present, scientific articles about this ongoing disaster concerned only sinkholes and subsidence phenomena. This paper focuses on the landslides issue along the Jordanian coast. Based on a set of ground observations collected since 1999, the dynamics of the triggering factors in relation to the evolution of the hydro-geological setting is discussed. It is inferred that the recent industrial and tourist infrastructures never took into consideration the very important geotechnical constraints resulting from the Dead Sea lowering.