Name: Scientists Use Drones to Track Dead Sea Sinkholes
Uploaded: undefined
Duration: undefined

NOVA

The Dead Sea is home to some 6,000 sinkholes—and as its water keeps receding, more will form.

How do sinkholes come to be, and how do researchers study them?

Scientists Use Drones to Track Dead Sea Sinkholes

Carlisle Companies

Viking

NOVA Science Trust Logo

The Dead Sea is home to some 6,000 sinkholes—and as its water keeps receding, more will form.

How do sinkholes come to be, and how do researchers study them?

Planet Earth

Scientists Use Drones to Track Dead Sea SinkholesPublished: September 3, 2019Onscreen: Back in the 1960s, the Dead Sea was almost up to the road. Now, in some areas it’s a mile away. And as the water declines, the beach has become inundated with sinkholes: 6,000 and counting.Gideon Hadas: It’s like the craters on the moon, but here, it’s not the moon. This is a dying sea.Onscreen: Geohydrologist Carmit Ish-Shalom is trying to predict when and where the next sinkhole will form. For years, she measured sinkholes the old fashioned way, with a measuring tape.Carmit Ish-Shalom: It’s very, very sophisticated: just throw it down there.Onscreen: But for areas where sinkholes are just beginning to develop, she uses a drone.Ish-Shalom: We can see the whole sinkhole from above, and we can see how big it is. Each month, we are monitoring them, trying to see the changes in the size, in the depth, how fast they form. There’s many kinds of sinkholes in the world; the kind that we have here in the Dead Sea is very unique.Onscreen: Most sinkholes form in rock, like limestone, but here at the Dead Sea they’re caused by salt. As the sea declines, an underground layer of dry salt is left behind. Fresh water, like in winter flash floods, saturates that salt, which quickly dissolves, creating an underground cavity. Over time, it grows bigger, until, suddenly, without warning, the earth above it caves in.While the cause of Dead Sea sinkholes is well known, after 20 years of careful measurement, there is still no detectable pattern for sinkhole formation. Each sinkhole seems to follow its own rules.Ish-Shalom: We don’t really know when the next one will form—next year or maybe two years from now or maybe tomorrow.

United States

Northern Mariana Islands

Puerto Rico

American Samoa

Guam

U.S. Virgin Islands

U.S. Minor Outlying Islands

US & Territories

Colossal explosions shake a remote corner of the Siberian tundra, leaving behind massive craters. In Alaska, a huge lake erupts with bubbles of inflammable gas. Scientists are discovering that these mystifying phenomena add up to a ticking time bomb, as long-frozen permafrost melts and releases vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. What are the implications of these dramatic developments in the Arctic? Scientists and local communities alike are struggling to grasp the scale of the methane threat and what it means for our climate future. (Premiered February 2, 2022)

In the Arctic, enormous releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, threaten the climate.

Arctic Sinkholes

The top half of Jupiter in blue and green against a night sky

A composite image of Jupiter using images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Judy Schmidt.

Explore the cosmos, delve into ancient history, and follow an extreme rescue with NOVA’s most-watched documentaries released in 2022.

NOVA’s most popular science documentaries of 2022

Four bright orange loops brand off of a dark blue blob

A transmission electron micrograph of HIV-1 virus particles (orange) replicating from the plasma membrane of an infected H9 T cell. Credit: NIAID, Flickr

Scientists have cured a handful of people of HIV by piggybacking on treatments they received for blood cancer. But does that bring a widespread cure any closer?

Scientists Use Drones to Track Dead Sea Sinkholes

Support Provided By

Explore More

The Death of the Dead Sea

To Save Water, Women in Jordan Learn to Plumb

Saving the Dead Sea

Transcript

Credits

Support Provided By

Explore More

The Death of the Dead Sea

To Save Water, Women in Jordan Learn to Plumb

Saving the Dead Sea