By Our Reporter
The shrinking Sea of Galilee, an inland lake in Israel, where Jesus walked on water, according to Matthew 14:22-33, is to be topped up with desalinated seawater.
Israeli officials said the land mark feature has suffered from four consecutive years of rain shortages and overuse, bringing its level to 20 centimetres below what experts consider acceptable.
The Guardian reported that a plan approved by the Israeli cabinet details how they will pump 100 million cubic metres of water annually by 2022 into the lake in the Galilee region.
Mr Yechezkel Lifshitz, from the country’s energy and water ministry said said that the long-term goal was to pump 1.1bn cubic metres per year by 2030, rising to 1.2bn when needed – at a “relatively high cost”, equivalent to more than $0.70 cents per cubic metre.
“We are turning the Kinneret (other name for the Sea of Galilee) into a reservoir for desalinated water,” said Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. “This is innovative and important, at least to the extent we are doing this, and has not been done until now.”
Researchers from Ben-Gurion University (BGU) in Israel said in a report last September that “Climatic factors alone are inadequate to explain the record shrinkage of the Sea of Galilee.”
Prof. Jonathan Laronne and Dr. Michael Wine wrote in their paper published by the Science of the Total Environment that they found no decreasing trends in inflow from the headwaters of the Upper Jordan River located primarily in Lebanon and northern Israel.
Rather, Laronne and Wine said the declining water levels in the upper Jordan River corresponded to a period of expanded irrigation agriculture in which the the rate of groundwater being pumped was doubled.
The researchers, according to Times of Israel, said that while an overall increase in temperature would cause water to evaporate, leading to a decrease in water levels, the temperature changes recorded in the Sea of Galilee were not significant enough to explain the observed decrease in water levels.
The researchers said their results demonstrated that to rehabilitate the Sea of Galilee, Israel must stop pumping fresh water from the lake and nearby streams.
