A new study has revealed that 120,000 years ago, during the Eemian, the Dead Sea dried down, demonstrating how dry the Middle East can become during warm phases. The Eemian is a stage in Earth history when global temperatures were as warm, if not warmer than at present.

The findings was the result of a drilling done by a consortium of investigators from Israel, the US, Germany, Japan, Switzerland and Norway on two cores into the Dead Sea's bed in late 2010. One centered close to the very deepest part of the lake and at 235m down, the drill hit a layer of small, rounded pebbles which the team believed were deposits of an ancient beach.

According to the researchers, given the location of the core, the finding suggest that the Dead Sea had a complete, or near, dry-down at some point in the past.

"Lake dry-down happened 120,000 years ago without any human intervention," said Prof Emi Ito, from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. "We're helping the lake level go down much sooner; and there are political implications of this lake drying down because water is what causes a lot of wars and I'll just leave it at that."

"The drilling actually... it gives us perspective. Look what went on in 200,000 years; look how the area can be dry and look at the way it can be recovered. We have to get ready for the future," added Prof Zvi Ben-Avraham, of the Minerva Dead Sea Research Centre, Tel Aviv University.

Unlike today when the Dead Sea's waters are being used by large populations, during those times few men lived around the Dead Sea.

"But we now know that in a previous warm period, the water that people are using today and are relying upon stopped flowing all by itself. That has important implications for people today because global climate models are predicting that this region in particular is going to become more arid in the future," said Steve Goldstein, a geochemist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, US.

Prof Goldstein presented the results of the drilling work at the 2011 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the largest annual gathering of Earth scientists.