Venice and the Dead Sea

Pumping Up Venice

Will Venice drown?

Venice has been sinking for centuries. Now a team of engineers and geologists is actually proposing to pump the sea under the city to lift it up.

The plan would involve drilling a dozen 2,300-foot-deep (700-meter-deep) holes, then using the holes to pump huge volumes of seawater into the spongy ground beneath the city. In theory, the spongy ground would absorb the water, expand, and, over 10 years, raise Venice by a foot (30 cm)--just about the amount it's sunk in three centuries.

Sound impossible? Some say so. But the team that came up with the plan hails from the prestigious University of Padua, and its leader--engineering professor Giuseppe Gambolati--has spent a career studying the marshy, sedimentary soil beneath Venice. He's setting up a three-year test to prove his idea can work.

Venice has long struggled to stay out of the drink. Built on dozens of islands in a lagoon off the Adriatic Sea, the city used to tear down and rebuild higher--atop the old foundations--whenever floods did enough damage. But when Venice became a virtual museum, that stopped. And high water flowing in from the sea has become more and more common. Historic St. Mark's Square, the lowest point in Venice, used to flood about 10 times a year. Now Venetians walking there get their feet wet some 200 times a year.

Already the Italian government is spending more than $5 billion on Project Moses, a controversial system of 78 massive underwater flood barriers designed to rise up out of the water and part the sea at high tide and so protect the city. Believers call Moses a godsend. Critics say it doesn't have a prayer of performing as promised. Either way, you should take at least a virtual visit to Venice now, before the water damage gets any worse.

Take a 360-degree tour of Venice, while it's still dry

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Killing the Dead Sea

Will the Dead Sea die?

Nothing but bacteria and fungi can survive in the super salty waters of the Dead Sea. But can the Dead Sea survive in the modern Middle East?

A study by Israel's ministries of the environment and national infrastructure has confirmed what many experts have been saying: that the Dead Sea could be dead and gone by 2050. It's drying up. In fact, in the last 75 years, the biblical body of water has lost about a third of its surface area.

Before, the Jordan River renewed it. Now, that water gets used for cities, farms, and hydroelectric power. So the sea recedes--exposing huge pillars of salt, caked at the shore like snow. (Sound familiar? It should. Biblical geography puts Sodom and Gomorrah, and Lot's turned-to-a-pillar-of-salt wife, close by the Dead Sea.)

At 1,370 feet (418 meters) below sea level, the Dead Sea is the lowest place on Earth--so low that it's close to deep minerals like salt, magnesium, calcium, bromine, and potassium. People swear that the greasy water and mud have healing properties as a result, and vacationers flock there to bathe in the one and cake themselves in the other.

Sunscreen is superfluous. Harmful UV rays get filtered out by the extra atmosphere above the low-lying lake and by the near-constant mist of evaporating lake water. Floaties are superfluous, too--you couldn't drown in the Dead Sea if you tried. The super salty water makes every bather buoyant. Yet every year the resorts are farther from the water's edge, and the Dead Sea recedes into the past.

See the Dead Sea, while it's still wet

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Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called "rain."
--Michael McClary

From: KnowledgeNews