TEM VIDA NO MAR MORTO? Uma viagem incrível no lugar mais profundo do planeta!

Shalom and welcome back to Israel with Aline! Today we are going to take a tour together of one of the most amazing places in the world, the Dead Sea! We will travel through the Judean desert and get to know the lowest place on earth, float in these incredible waters and learn about the sinkholes and their relationship to the biblical prophecies. Then we’re going to hit the road, and travel to the Dead Sea which is less than an hour away from here in Jerusalem. So if you are ready let’s get started! I decided to make a quick stop here to show you this place. this is the sea level, I mean, we are literally at sea level here, and we are going down, we are going from here to the Dead Sea which is 470 yards below sea level, the deepest place on the planet! But before that I want to show you our friend here, come on! And as a good friend, I could not come empty-handed, so I brought here a little carrot for our friend, this here is one of the many camels that belong to the Bedouin community, do you want a little kiss too? That belongs to the Bedouin community, they are Arab Muslim nomads who live here in the desert, and many of them to this day have camels, so you can see here one of their camels that you can come and walk here in the Desert. But well folks, let’s get on with our tour now! We are arriving at the Dead Sea and the Dead Sea is actually not a sea, but a lake, a lake of extremely salty water and it borders Israel and Jordan. We have arrived, folks! We have now arrived at the hotel zone of the Dead Sea, these beaches are called the beaches of Ein Bokek, I changed my costume to be able to enter the water but now here in Israel it is winter and it is around 77 °F today here, so let’s now enter the water together, come on! And the first thing we notice is that there is a thin layer of sand, but underneath that the whole floor is made of salt and there are even these huge rocks of salt here that we find everywhere and this is because the Dead Sea has ten times more concentration than the Mediterranean sea and the other seas, and this makes the water so dense that we float on it! And the amount of minerals in the water creates these salt plates that even look like mini islands, and the salt in the water also crystallizes on everything that goes in, so anything that goes into the Dead Sea, after a few weeks it will start to create a layer of salt around it. Look at the transparency of the water, people, and as you can see I am literally standing in the water right now, without my feet touching the ground, I mean, we can’t really sink in this sea, and we can float, but it’s not just the fun of being able to float in the waters, but these waters are therapeutic they are medicinal since the ancient world already knew this. I mean, King Herod built one of the first spas in the ancient world here at the Dead Sea and until today people come from all over the world to enjoy these medicinal waters. From these waters, minerals are also extracted, creams are made, and everything is good and better. It is a place to relax, to enjoy, really an amazing place, and that who comes to Israel has to come here as well. But let me relax a few more minutes and then we will continue our tour, let’s go! But why is this beautiful place called the Dead Sea? Because inside this water there is no life; fish, animals and plants cannot live because of the amount of minerals, but in reality this is not the name of the place. The name of the place in Hebrew is Yam Ha’ Melach, which means “the sea of salt”, and that is also what the Bible called this place from the very beginning, in Genesis 14:3. And the reality is that yes, there is life there! Not in the water, but around the Dead Sea, and this is what we are going to get to know together now. So guys we stopped here to have a snack on our ride, and we have friends now who decided to stop in the car with us, this one is a typical species from here which is called Tristamit, so I’ll let them have a snack a little bit and we’ll be on our way, let’s go! And here in the middle of the Judean desert we find this amazing date plantation. You may have heard the expression that the land of Israel flowing with milk and honey, but the honey the Bible refers to is not bee honey, but date honey, which is this concentrated extract taken from one hundred percent of dates, which reminds us of bee honey and all this is directly connected to the life of John the Baptist who lived here in the Judean desert. And as is told in Matthew chapter three, he also ate wild honey, which is another name for date honey. And when we come here and see these gigantic plantations, see how many dates really come out of here, the land of Israel flows with milk and honey from dates! The Dead Sea is going through one of its greatest transformations in the last millennia, and this is because of human intervention, which is diverting part of the water that should reach the Dead Sea, for example the Jordan River itself, where part of the water is diverted both for agriculture and for cities. And this is done both by Israel and Jordan, and the result is that there is less water entering the Dead Sea than leaving it by evaporation, and the level of the Dead Sea has started to drop. It drops today, people, around three feet a year, which is a lot, people, every year by three feet , and where I am standing now was the Old Highway, and right next to it the Dead Sea was already passing! And you can see how it’s receding, receding back and moving further and further away from us! And this creates an extraordinary phenomenon, which is called the sinkholes, which are these huge craters here at the edge of the Dead Sea, but how does that happen? There’s freshwater running here underground, it comes from towards the mountains, and runs to the Dead Sea, but since the Dead Sea is retreating, it’s leaving behind all that zone full of dirt, mud, and a lot of salt. And when that freshwater passes, it dissolves the salt inside, and takes it to the Dead Sea creating gaps inside this land, and these gaps grow, keep growing and growing until they create underground, gigantic craters and they collapse creating the sinkholes here, this one guys is small, the biggest of all found so far is 85 feet deep! The sinkholes began to appear only in the seventies, and with a little more than fifty years, more than six thousand have already been created! That whole area of the Dead Sea today is full of sinkholes. But an amazing thing is that this is happening practically only on the Israeli side, on the Jordanian side there are five sinkholes, and here on the Israeli side over six thousand! Each of these six thousand sinkholes is different from the other, here you can see that around us there is part of this medicinal mud from the Dead Sea, But the sinkhole itself is full of salt crystals, this is pure salt, look here! To see the strength of the sinkholes phenomenon, look back here, this whole road collapsed, and not only that, we also see next to it a date plantation, which had to be abandoned because of this phenomenon! And you can see that when irrigation stops here in the middle of the desert, this is what happens. As we saw part of the sinkholes started to fill up with water, but inside some of them have fresh water nowadays. And this started to attract vegetation, small animals, birds, you see all this here around us now, I mean, around the Dead Sea life is coming back! And this reminds us of the Bible prophecies in the book of Ezekiel: “These waters flow towards the east, towards the eastern region, going down to the Arabah, to the Jordan River Valley, and reaching the Dead Sea. And as they enter the salt waters, these will become sweet and healthy, where the river passes there will be all kinds of animals and fish because these clear waters flow there and heal the salt waters, so that where the river passes, everything will come to life.” (Ezekiel 47:8-9) I hope you have enjoyed our tour today, to know a little bit more here of the Dead Sea region, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel because many more tours of this wonderful land will come! A kiss, Shalom, and until next time!