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Israel, Jordan agree on Dead Sea pipeline plan Israel and Jordan agreed a plan on Sunday to lay an $800 million pipeline to rescue the shrinking Dead Sea. The two countries, meeting at the Earth Summit, said they would study ways to pipe water north from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, which they share, in their biggest cooperation deal since a 1994 peace accord. The pipeline would stretch about 200 miles and aim to help refill the sea, which is falling by about three feet a year. The sea is fed by the Jordan River. Increased demands on the region's fresh water mean that the inflow does not compensate for massive surface evaporation, and environmentalists say the salt lake could vanish by 2050 if nothing is done. "We hope outside donors and the World Bank will help," said Israel's Jacob Keidar, a senior Foreign Ministry official attending the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. He said that Germany was among nations interested in supporting the project, which he said would protect the environment and help promote tourism. The sea's banks are the lowest dry land on the planet at about 400 yards below sea level. Bathers float without effort, buoyed by the extreme saltiness of the waters. The shrinking of the lake, whose shores include sites holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians, has caused subsidence along the eastern shore in Jordan, forcing the evacuation of about 3,000 people. Keidar said it would take several years to lay the pipeline if it got the go-ahead after a series of feasibility studies.
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