Slip rate and locking depth from GPS profiles across the southern Dead Sea Transform

Abstract

[1] The Dead Sea Transform is a major strike-slip fault bounding the Arabia plate and the Sinai subplate. On the basis of two GPS campaign measurements, 6 years apart, at 17 sites distributed in Israel and Jordan, complemented by Israeli permanent stations, we compute the present-day deformation across the southern segment of the Dead Sea Transform, the Wadi Araba fault. Elastic locked-fault modeling of fault-parallel velocities provides a slip rate of 4.9 ± 1.4 mm/a and a best fit locking depth of $12 km. This slip rate is slightly higher than previous results based only on Israeli permanent GPS stations data, which are located west of the fault. It is in good agreement with results based on offset geomorphologic and geologic features that average longer periods of time (10 ka to 1 Ma). Projection in ITRF2000 reference frame allows using our data, combined with results published earlier, to further study the kinematics between Arabia, Nubia, and Sinai. Systematic combination of Euler poles available in the literature, in addition to our new set of data, shows that a wide range of Arabia-Sinai pole positions and angular velocities predict reasonable slip rate on the Dead Sea fault. We highlight uncertainties of calculating such poles due to the small size of the blocks and their slow relative motion along a short and almost straight strand of the transform fault, which lead to a large trade-off between pole location and angular velocity.

Variable behavior of the Dead Sea Fault along the southern Arava segment from GPS measurements

“…The velocity is varying from a rate of $ 5 mm/yr along the southern and central segments to a rate of $ 2 mm/yr along the northern segment (north of 358N). An average locking depth of 11 AE 9 km is proposed along the southernmost segment (Al-Tarazi et al, 2011;Le Bé on et al, 2008;Sadeh et al, 2012) while this locking depth is very difficult to estimate along the northernmost segment (Alchalbi et al, 2010).…”

“…Recent studies have characterized the first order geodetic velocity field around the DSF (Alchalbi et al, 2010;Al-Tarazi et al, 2011;Gomez et al, 2007;Le Bé on et al, 2008;Reilinger et al, 2006;Sadeh et al, 2012;Wdowinski et al, 2004). The velocity is varying from a rate of $ 5 mm/yr along the southern and central segments to a rate of $ 2 mm/yr along the northern segment (north of 358N).…”

Rising of the lowest place on Earth due to Dead Sea water‐level drop: Evidence from SAR interferometry and GPS

“…Understanding the different contributions to surface deformation and their spatiotemporal distribution is important for the identification of the ground displacement due to the sea level drop. The Dead Sea basin lies within an active left lateral transform [Freund et al, 1970;Garfunkel, 1997], whose current slip rate and locking depth are about 5 mm per year and 15-20 km, respectively [Wdowinski et al, 2004;Le Beon et al, 2008;Sadeh, 2011]. The contribution to the satellite line-of-sight (LOS) measurements of such slip rate along the Dead Sea transform cannot exceed 0.2 mm per year.…”

New constraints on the Nubia–Sinai–Dead Sea fault crustal motion

“…Wdowinski et al (2004) estimated a slip rate of 3.7 ± 0.4 mm/yr from 10 GPS permanent stations. Combining permanent and campaign data, Le Beon et al (2008) provided a 7.9 ± 1.4 mm/yr slip rate along the DST fault. Using a larger data set than Table 6 Horizontal velocity field of Sinai and Arabian GPS sites in Nubia-fixed frame with uncertainties.…”