Dead Sea Warming and the Origin of Salt Giants

Emmanuel Guillerm, Tim K Lowenstein, Véronique Gardien, Fabian Bärenbold, Damien Bouffard, Achim Brauer, Frédéric, Caupin

Episodically, vast seas on Earth partly dried out, leaving deposits called “salt giants”. Recently, in addition to well-documented accelerated level decline and salt precipitation, the Dead Sea has suffered severe warming. The mechanisms underlying this warming and the formation of salt giants remain unresolved. Here we propose a physical model of hypersaline waterbodies that reproduces Dead Sea observations and projects extreme warming: within the next 200 years, water temperatures will rise twice as much as anthropogenic air warming. Applied to the Messinian Salinity Crisis, 5.5 Ma, our model reveals that a positive feedback between water temperature increase and water level lowering drove massive Mediterranean Sea warming and drawdown and best explains the accumulation of highly soluble minerals under temperate humid conditions.