Carmit Ish-Shalom picks up a rock and tosses it into the abyss, then she counts: one, two, three … on four, a faint plonk echoes up from the deep fissure in the bitumen.

This narrow crack in the highway will one day collapse into a gaping sinkhole, but for now the surface is holding beneath our feet.

A hydrogeologist who specialises in sinkholes, Dr Ish-Shalom lived at En Gedi for 10 years, studying the mysterious phenomenon plaguing these shores.

She has seen dozens of sinkholes like this one open up at the beachside resort, and the problem is accelerating.

The highway, built in 2010 with a supposedly sinkhole-proof design, was swallowed sooner than experts had predicted.

“This is a disaster but it’s not an earthquake,” Dr Ish-Shalom says. “The main problem is the [Dead Sea’s water] level. This is the reason for the sinkholes.”

At 430 metres below sea level, the Dead Sea is the lowest point on the planet, sitting at the bottom of the Great Rift Valley. 

For millennia the lake […]