Dead Sea Rift

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Dead Sea Rift is part of the Syrian-African Rift^[1] in a long fissure in the Earth's surface called the Great Rift Valley. The 6000 km (3700 mile) long Great Rift Valley extends from the Taurus Mountains of Turkey to the Zambezi Valley in southern Africa and formed in Miocene times as a result of the Arabian Plate moving northward then eastward, away from the African Plate.

The extensive tectonic activity of the Dead Sea Rift in the southern Wadi Araba, since early Miocene, resulted in very clear landscape expressions. The Dead Sea occupies the lowest part of the Rift Valley and located within the Dead Sea Transform which is a plate boundary separating the Arabian plate from the African plate and connects the divergent plate boundary in the Red Sea to the convergent plate boundary in the Red Sea to the convergent plate boundary in the Taurus mountains in southern Turkey^[2].

The interpretation of the tectonic regime that led to the development of the Dead Sea Rift is highly contested. Some consider it as a transform fault that accommodates a 105 km northwards displacement of the Arabian plate (e.g. Freund et al., 1970; Jaffe and Garfunkel, 1987), and trace its structural evolution to the early Miocene. Others presume that the Rift is an incipient oceanic spreading center, the northern extension of the Red Sea tectonic spreading center (Horowitz, 2001), and the displacement along it is oblique, with approximately 10-15 km of extension and a similar amount of sinistral strike-slip. The evolution of the rift, according to this latter model, started in the late Miocene with the linear series of basins that propagated gradually along their axes to form the present rift valley (Mart, 1994). The occurrence of a system of rivers that flowed from northern Arabia to the Mediterranean in the latest Miocene supports the acceptance of the extensional origin and mostly post-mid-Miocene age of the Dead Sea Rift.