So let’s leave the dead sea alone and move on to the Persian gulf.
The Persian gulf is huge—some 250,000 square km, and extremely hot. It probably evaporates about a billion tons of water a day.
And yet it’s completely surrounded by desert in every direction. Even Dubai, sandwich with sea to the west, north and east is as parched as it can get.
Despite all the water evaporating from the sea, there’s still very little rain in the Arabian peninsula or in Iran. I don’t know why that is precisely, but it seems to me that it breaks down the seemingly simple calculation: evaporate lots of water here, get rain further downwind.
It seems to me that simply evaporating lots of water would be very unlikely to achieve the changes you would actually want to.
So let’s leave the dead sea alone and move on to the Persian gulf.
The Persian gulf is huge—some 250,000 square km, and extremely hot. It probably evaporates about a billion tons of water a day.
And yet it’s completely surrounded by desert in every direction. Even Dubai, sandwich with sea to the west, north and east is as parched as it can get.
Despite all the water evaporating from the sea, there’s still very little rain in the Arabian peninsula or in Iran. I don’t know why that is precisely, but it seems to me that it breaks down the seemingly simple calculation: evaporate lots of water here, get rain further downwind.
It seems to me that simply evaporating lots of water would be very unlikely to achieve the changes you would actually want to.