The highest point on the Earth’s surface is at the top of Mount Everest, which is over 29,000 feet (8,800 meters) above sea level. But what is the lowest point on land?
The lowest dry land is on the banks of the Dead Sea in the Middle East. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), they are located approximately 1,300 feet (430 m) above sea level.
The banks of the Dead Sea are the lowest point on dry land, but not the deepest point on the surface of the Earth. The distinction belongs to the Challenger, deep within the Mariana Trench, with the Pacific point reaching approximately 35,876 feet. [10,935 m] Under the surface of the planet.
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The exact depth of the Dead Sea surface varies every day. According to NASA, on hot, dry summer days, water levels can drop to 1 inch (2-3 centimeters) due to evaporation.
Rather than actually being the ocean, the Dead Sea is a large salty lake, 47 miles long (76 kilometers) and 11 miles wide (18 kilometers). The “Dead Sea” was named by a monk. The monks noticed that there appears to be no life in the salt water, Noah pointed out.
The Dead Sea is located along the Dead Sea Fault, spanning approximately 600 miles (1,000 km) from the Red Sea to the Taurus Mountains in Turkey, and began to form nearly 20 million years ago. Faults help form the boundary between the African tectonic plate to the west and the Arabian boundary to the east. NASA points out that Dead Sea is in the Great Lift Valley, which is currently tore through the African continent.
“The death fault is a transformation fault, mainly similar to the San Andreas fault in California, where two plates move next to each other,” Rob Pockalny, a research scientist with the Associate Marine Corps at the University of Rhode Island, told Live Science.
Related: How many tectonic plates do Earth have?
Both sides of the fault move north, but the east moves a little faster, about 5 mm [0.19 inches] Every year, “ZVI Ben Abraham, a marine geophysicist at the Minerva Dead Sea Research Center at Tel Aviv University in Israel, told Live Science. In comparison, “The San Andreas Fault runs 10 times faster.”
Previously, researchers suggested that the Dead Sea formed due to the zigzag of the dead fault. If the Dead Sea Fault is completely straight, one side can slide relatively smoothly next to the other. However, if the fault contains zigzags, if one side passes the other, a gap will form in the zigzag region where both sides of the fault are pulled apart. Such a “pull apartment basin” can have steep walls and can help explain why the Dead Sea is so low, Pockalny said.
However, the standard model of the Pull Apartment Basin suggests that they will be long before they become deeper. In contrast, the Dead Sea basin is much wider than deep, Ben Avraham said. The sediments that make up the South Sea floor extend to nearly 15km. [9.3 miles]and that part of the basin is only about 10 km. [6 miles] wide. “
Instead, Ben Abraham and his colleagues suggest that the Dead Sea is a “drop-down basin.” They spread a little further apart as both sides of the fault passed each other, but “but a mass of isolated basalt peeled off from them and fell down about four million years ago,” Ben Avraham said. “So the Dead Sea Basin was deeper and the rest of the dimensions remained fixed.”
Determining which model of the Dead Sea layer might be correct is challenging,” Ben Avraham said. “It’s extremely difficult and expensive to understand what’s going on in real time in this part of the crust.”
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