The Dead Sea, located in the Dead Sea Basin (DSB) at the lowest continental elevation on Earth (426 m bsl), has alternately expanded during ice ages and contracted during interglacials. At its maximum extent during the last ice age as glacial Lake Lisan, it filled the DSB from its present location northward to the Sea of Galilee. Its changing size and composition through time reflects the climatic-hydrologic history and the tectonic architecture of its location, in the mid-latitudes, on the continent, and on the boundary between the Saharan desert and Mediterranean climate zones. These changes are recorded and preserved in the lake sediments, giving them unique potential for investigating the expansion and contraction of these climatic zones, as well as the linkages between high latitude and tropical climate. Moreover, the DSB located along the Dead Sea Transform Fault, is an active tectonic region where sediments preserve the history of earthquakes. The DSB is also the locus of humankind’s migration out of Africa, and the home of peoples from Paleolithic to modern times. Studies of the sedimentary sections exposed on the Dead Sea margins have been applied to issues with global and regional implications associated with paleoclimate, tectonics, paleoseismology, paleomagnetism and human history. In order to overcome critical limitations regarding continuity of the exposures, an International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) drilling campaign to the Dead Sea took place. The purpose of the drilling was to recover a long term and continuous paleo-seismic and climatic archive, going back several glacial-interglacial cycles.