Photos: Aerial view of Dead Sea salt formations and sinkholes

Ein Gedi: In the heyday of the Ein Gedi spa in the 1960s, holidaymakers could marinate in heated pools and then slip into the briny Dead Sea. Now the same beach is punctured by craters. A spectacular expanse of water in the desert, flanked by cliffs to east and west, the Dead Sea has lost a third of its surface area since 1960.

The blue water recedes about a metre (yard) every year, leaving behind a lunar landscape whitened by salt and perforated with gaping holes.

The sinkholes can exceed 10 metres (33 feet) in depth and are a testament to the shrinking sea.

Receding salt water leaves behind underground salt deposits. Runoff from periodic flash floods then percolates into the ground and dissolves the salt patches. Without support, the land above collapses.

At the Ein Gedi thermal baths, the roughly three kilometres (two miles) of rocky sand that now separate the spa from the shore are dotted with holes and crevices.

Further north, a whole tourist complex has turned into a ghost town, disfigured by craters and enclosed in fences. The pavement is gutted, the lampposts overturned, the date plantation abandoned.

Climate change further accelerates evaporation. In Sodom, Israel, southwest of the Dead Sea, the country's highest temperature in over 70 years was recorded in July 2019 - 49.9 degrees Celsius, or nearly 122 Fahrenheit.

A hiker visits patterns formed by crystalized minerals.

So is the Dead Sea doomed to evaporate? Scientists say its decline is inevitable for at least the next 100 years. Sinkholes will keep spreading over the century. However, the lake could reach an equilibrium because as its surface decreases, the water becomes saltier and evaporation slows down.

Patterns formed by crystalized minerals on the surface of evaporation ponds of the Dead Sea.