Jordan's geography: a desert plateau that breaks off into the rift

How the land falls from plateau to rift

Britannica divides Jordan into three regions running east to west: the desert, the uplands east of the Jordan River, and the Jordan Valley, which is the north-western end of the East African Rift System. The plateau lies mostly between 700 and 1,200 metres. Its western edge is an escarpment that overlooks the rift, and the uplands along it average 600 to 900 metres, rising to over 1,700 metres in the south.

The valley floor is the boundary between two plates. The Dead Sea Transform separates the Arabian plate from the African plate, and the Arabian side has moved about 105 kilometres north along it. The rift that results runs about 380 kilometres from the Yarmouk River in the north to Aqaba in the south, and it holds, in order, the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea and Wadi Araba. The 1033 Jordan Valley earthquake, the last large one on this fault, is recorded as having killed 70,000 people.

No single peak dominates. The record names Jabal Umm ad Dami, in a remote stretch of the southern desert; the Wadi Rum article gives it 1,840 metres by survey and 1,854 by satellite data, and from its top the Red Sea can be seen on a clear day. Britannica names Jabal Ram above Wadi Rum, at 1,754 metres, as the highest point, and Wikipedia's account gives Jabal Ram 1,734 metres.

The borders seldom follow the land. Apart from short stretches along the Yarmouk and the rift, they were fixed by agreements: the line with Saudi Arabia was first defined in the Hadda Agreement of 1925 and redrawn in 1965, when Jordan took 19 kilometres of coast on the Gulf of Aqaba and 6,000 square kilometres of interior and ceded 7,000 square kilometres of inland territory. The shoreline on the gulf is 26 kilometres long, and Aqaba is the only port.

Where the Jordan River runs and what it carries

The Jordan River is about 300 kilometres long by Britannica's figure. It drains Lake Tiberias, the Yarmouk and the streams off both escarpments, and meanders south into the Dead Sea. The Yarmouk, its main tributary, forms part of the boundary with Syria and with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The Zarqa, the second tributary, rises and flows entirely inside Jordan.

The northern part of the rift, from the Yarmouk to the Dead Sea, is the Ghor, a trench up to 22 kilometres wide with steep walls on both sides. Jordan's best soils are here and south-east of the Dead Sea, where alluvium washed off the uplands has spread in fans over the marl. Most of the wadis that cut down into the trench carry water only in the short winter rains. Their canyons are deep enough to block travel whether they are running or dry.

South of the Dead Sea the rift continues as Wadi Araba, 180 kilometres of dry valley floor to Aqaba.

Why the Dead Sea keeps falling

The Dead Sea fills a closed basin whose floor lies far below the rim of the escarpments, and its water carries about 250 grams of dissolved salt per litre at the surface. It has been measured continuously since 1930, when its surface covered 1,050 square kilometres and lay 390 metres below sea level. It was at 395 metres below in 1970 and 418 metres below in 2006, falling by about a metre a year, and by 2025 it had reached 439 metres below sea level.

The fall has changed the shape of the sea. The former Lisan Peninsula is now a land bridge that divides the water into a northern and a southern basin. As of 2021 the surface had shrunk by about 33% since the 1960s, a loss attributed in part to the reduced flow of the Jordan River. Fresh water running down into the exposed salt beds dissolves them, and the cavities collapse as sinkholes, which have closed most of the beach resorts on the western shore of the northern basin.

Jordan has looked south for a replacement. In October 2009 the government accelerated a plan to draw about 300 million cubic metres a year from the Red Sea, desalinate it and send the brine to the Dead Sea by tunnel, and in December 2013 Israel and Jordan signed an agreement to build a desalination plant near Aqaba as part of a Red Sea to Dead Sea scheme.

What the eastern desert is made of

The desert is mostly the Syrian Desert, an extension of the Arabian, and it occupies the east and the south. Its northern part is volcanic, fields of lava and basalt; its southern part is sandstone and granite, worn down mainly by wind. Much of it has no outlet to the sea, so sediment collects in closed basins where water evaporates or sinks into the ground. South of Karak the intermittent wadis run east into the Al-Jafr Depression. Most of the east receives less than 120 millimetres of rain a year and is the least populated part of the country.

The desert has two inhabited points of note. The oasis at Azraq, about 115 kilometres east of Amman, holds pools and marshes, and the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature has protected it since 1978 as the first wetland in Jordan listed under the Ramsar Convention. In the far south, Wadi Rum is a valley cut into sandstone and granite about 60 kilometres east of Aqaba, with tall cliffs of iron-rich Umm Ishrin sandstone separated by flat floors of alluvium, sand and salt pan. UNESCO inscribed 74,000 hectares of it in 2011 for both its landforms and the 25,000 rock carvings and 20,000 inscriptions left in it over some 12,000 years.

The Bedouin divide the desert by animal. Britannica describes the eastern tribes as principally camel breeders and the western ones as herders of sheep and goats; the grazing grounds of the Bani Sakhr and the Howeitat lie entirely within Jordan, while the Rwala pass through each year between Syria and Saudi Arabia.

What the Gulf of Aqaba adds in the south

At its southern tip the rift reaches the sea. Aqaba sits at the head of the gulf with a hot desert climate: winters are mild, summers very hot and dry, and frost comes only every few years. The city recorded its highest temperature, 49.6 °C, on 14 August 2025 and its lowest, minus 3.9 °C, on 16 January 2008. In Roman times the Via Traiana Nova ran south from Bosra through Amman to end here at Aela, and the town remains the country's single outlet to the sea.

How much of the coast came from the 1965 exchange depends on which account is read. Wikipedia's geography of Jordan gives 19 kilometres, its history of Jordan about 18, and its article on Aqaba 12 kilometres of shore south of the town, including the Yamanieh coral reef. The town and its hinterland are run by the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority as a low-tax, duty-free zone.

How rain divides the country

The climate runs from Mediterranean in the west to desert in the east and south, and the Mediterranean is the main influence on it. Rain falls in the short cool winters, from November to April. Britannica gives about 400 millimetres a year in the north-west near the river, about 355 on the uplands, 200 on the valley floor and a quarter of that in the desert, falling to under 100 in the south. On the higher ground the rainfall decides where the villages are, which is why the main towns, Irbid, Jerash, Zarqa, Amman, As-Salt, Madaba and Karak, line the western highlands.

Temperature follows height and distance from the sea. Average monthly temperatures at Amman run from 8 to 26 °C and at Aqaba from 16 to 33 °C. Frost is common in winter except in the rift, and snow falls a couple of times a year in western Amman. For a month or so either side of the summer, hot dry winds from the south or south-east, the khamsin, bring dust, raise the temperature by several degrees within hours and can dry out crops; in summer a steady north-westerly, the shamal, blows by day.

How rainfall thins from west to east

Where the forests and reserves are

Forest covers about 1,500 square kilometres, under 2% of the country, nearly all of it in the rocky north-western highlands. The trees there are Aleppo pine, Aleppo and kermes oak, Palestinian pistachio, the eastern strawberry tree and wild olive, with Phoenician juniper where the rain is thinner; farther east the steppe is wormwood and grass. The national flower is the black iris. Wildlife listed by Britannica includes ibex, gazelles, wolves, hyenas and wild boar, with golden eagles and vultures overhead, and the European Investment Bank counts 500 million migrating birds passing through Jordan every year.

The Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, set up in 1966, runs the network of protected areas. It fenced its first reserve, Shaumari in the eastern desert, in 1975.

Dana runs from the Qadisiyya plateau, above 1,500 metres, down to the floor of Wadi Araba, and UNESCO classified it as a biosphere reserve in 1998. Mujib takes its name from the Wadi Mujib gorge in its south.

How Jordan gets its water

The US Commerce Department's 2025 country guide put Jordan's renewable fresh water at 61 cubic metres per person per year, against the 500 cubic metres generally used as the threshold of absolute scarcity, and said renewable sources met about two-thirds of consumption. Agriculture uses about half of the water and contributes 6.9% of output. According to the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, groundwater is being pumped twice as fast as it is replenished.

Supply is rationed. The Green Climate Fund reported that in 2022 the country ran a water deficit of 20% with 94% of homes on the network, and that most households received water for less than 48 hours a week. Many keep tanks on their roofs for the days the mains are off. Leaks, theft and faulty meters lost nearly half of all water; the share was down to 45% in 2025 against a target of under 25% by 2040. The 31 treatment plants were cleaning more than 200 million cubic metres of wastewater a year in 2025, and the government is directing it to farm use.

The largest answer is a pipeline. The Aqaba to Amman Water Desalination and Conveyance Project is designed to take 300 million cubic metres a year from the Gulf of Aqaba, treat it by reverse osmosis and pump it 438 kilometres north through four pumping stations to the reservoirs near Amman, with a solar plant of about 281 megawatts covering part of its power. The Green Climate Fund expects it to meet about 40% of municipal demand by 2030. The dates have moved: the European Investment Bank, which lent €200 million in December 2022, wrote of water reaching Amman before the end of 2028, while the 2025 Commerce guide gave construction from 2026 and operation in 2030.