21 June, 2010

New7Wonders of Nature [Dead Sea]

The Dead Sea (Arabic: البَحْر المَيّت‎, al-Baḥr El-Mayyit, Hebrew: יָם הַ‏‏מֶּ‏‏לַ‏ח‎, Yām Ha-Melaḥ; "Dead Sea" , "Sea of Salt"), also called the Salt Sea, is a salt lake bordering Israel and the West Bank to the west, and Jordan to the east. Its surface and shores are 422 metres (1,385 ft) below sea level,[2] the lowest elevation on the Earth's surface on dry land. The Dead Sea is 378 m (1,240 ft) deep, the deepest hypersaline lake in the world. It is also one of the world's saltiest bodies of water, with 33.7% salinity. Only Lake Assal (Djibouti), Garabogazköl and some hypersaline lakes of the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica (such as Don Juan Pond) have a higher salinity. It is 8.6 times more salty than the ocean. This salinity makes for a harsh environment where animals cannot flourish, hence its name. The Dead Sea is 67 kilometres (42 mi) long and 18 kilometres (11 mi) wide at its widest point. It lies in the Jordan Rift Valley, and its main tributary is the Jordan River.
The Dead Sea has attracted visitors from around the Mediterranean basin for thousands of years. Biblically, it was a place of refuge for King David. It was one of the world's first health resorts (for Herod the Great), and it has been the supplier of a wide variety of products, from balms for Egyptian mummification to potash for fertilizers. People also use the salt and the minerals from the Dead Sea to create cosmetics and herbal sachets.
The sea has a density of 1.24kg/L, making swimming difficult.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Poverty:

It is estimated that more than 40 percent of the population regularly consume less than the absolute critical minimum of 1800 kilocalories per day. These 50 million people are amongst the poorest in the world by any standard of development. Furthermore, it has been estimated that the number of absolute poor has risen significantly. The poverty of these deprived people is deep rooted, pervasive and multi-faceted, relating not just to the absence of reliable incomes and productive assets, but also to food, safe water, sanitation, education, shelter, inequities, injustice and lack of power. These deprived people are also extremely vulnerable to disaster and disease. The challenges posed by this massive poverty are enormous for a country with accelerating environmental degradation of an overpopulated land base. The human development indicators for Bangladesh are also staggeringly low. Bangladesh has an adult literacy rate of 37 percent, life expectancy of 58 years and population below poverty level of 45 percent. Urban slum dwellers now account for some 15 percent of the population and this is still growing by 6 percent per year.