资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

There are currently more than 5500 sinkholes along the Dead Sea in Israel. These were formed due to the dissolution of subsurface salt layers as a result of the replacement of hypersaline groundwater by fresh brackish groundwater. This process has been associated with a sharp decline in the Dead Sea water level, currently more than 1 m/yr, resulting in a lower water table that has allowed the intrusion of fresher brackish water. We studied the distribution of the sinkhole sizes and found that it is scale free with a power law exponent close to 2. We constructed a stochastic cellular automata model to understand the observed scale- free behavior and the growth of the sinkhole area in time. The model consists of a lower salt layer and an upper soil layer in which cavities that develop in the lower layer lead to collapses in the upper layer. The model reproduces the observed power law distribution without involving the threshold behavior commonly associated with criticality.

Plain Language Summary The paper deals with the very interesting phenomenon of sinkholes along the Dead Sea shoreline and uses data collected during 17 years of dangerous field work. There are currently more than 5500 sinkholes along the Dead Sea in Israel; their size ranges from a few meters to tens of meters. These were formed due to dissolution of subsurface salt layers as a result of the replacement of hypersaline groundwater by fresh brackish groundwater. This process was associated with the sharp decline in the Dead Sea level (represents a fall of 34 m during the last 50 years), currently more than 1 m/yr, resulting in a lower water table that has allowed the intrusion of fresher brackish water. We studied, for the first time, the distribution of the sinkholes sizes and surprisingly found that it is scale free with a power law exponent close to 2, indicating that the sinkhole formation belongs to the wider family of scale- free processes. This founding is new and very interesting in both the context of scale- free research and sinkholes research. We constructed a stochastic cellular automata model to understand the observed scale- free behavior and the growth of the sinkhole area in time.