Ofir Ben Tov, an aerial photographer from Tel Aviv, has spent 9 years documenting the disappearance of the Dead Sea from the seat of a Cessna airplane. “I’ve been observing the process [of the Dead Sea drying up] for a few years now,” says Ben Tov. “The land is changing.” The cause of that change is two-fold: water from the Jordan River to the north is being diverted and the water that remains in the sea is being funneled out through canals.

It’s been calculated that the Dead Sea is losing water by the astounding rate of 1 meter a year. “There’s a huge area that was once sea and now it is dry land and sinkholes,” Ben Tov says. “This is a very, very dangerous phenomenon.”