For Dead Sea, a slow death - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com

"'The situation of the Dead Sea is something that happened because there's a water shortage and it's needed for other uses,' Cohen said. 'You can say, 'Don't think of anything else. Let the Dead Sea have the water,' but no one will listen. They'll say, 'So we won't have water in Tel Aviv or the Negev or where?' '

The best hope for a solution, some believe, is to pump salt water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea via a proposed 120-mile Red-Dead Canal, a $5 billion project that the Jordanian government is pursuing with international donors. The World Bank will help fund a $20 million study of the idea.
But Israeli experts say similar proposals -- including a Med-Dead canal to pump water from the Mediterranean -- have been around for more than 30 years and are unlikely to work. According to Amos Bein of the Geological Survey of Israel, chemical and biological reactions produced by mixing Dead Sea water with seawater could change the blue color of the Dead Sea to white or red or create deadly gases.

In the end, he said, the sea will continue falling about three feet a year for the next 150 years or so, until the water becomes so supersaturated with salt that evaporation effectively stops. At that point, according to Bein, the surface of the Dead Sea will be one-third smaller and about 434 feet lower than today.

'It's possible to see the half-full part of the glass,' he said. 'The Dead Sea will never dry up.'"