Is The Dead Sea Dying?

For 20,000 years, the Dead Sea has lain in the sun. Its waters are a chemical soup. Mineral salts crystallizing on the shore are part of its rare beauty and a hint of its future.

The dead sea is slowly drying up, reports CBS News Correspondent Jesse Schulman.

The ancients thought its waters were poisoned; a bird who strayed into its vapors, they thought, would die in mid-flight.

Travelers come for the seaÂ's purported curative powers, seeking relief from skin ailments and aching bones. But a spa built at waterÂ's edge back in the 1970s now needs a trolley to take bathers to the shore. In some places, the sea is retreating by 100 yards a year.

The culprit is progress; water that once topped up the Dead Sea now gets diverted for human use.

The Dead SeaÂ's main water source is the Jordan River, which is already 80 percent diverted. Now, following a year of drought, there is a plan to divert even more of the Dead SeaÂ's lifeblood.

Add it all up and the salt flats should keep growing. The Dead Sea could be rescued, say the experts, by cutting a canal to bring water from the Red Sea, 120 miles away. The price tag, though, is $5 billion.

For the foreseeable future, it seems the Dead Sea will go on slowly disappearing into the searing desert sky.

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