Abstract
5000 yr of paleoseismicity along the southern Dead Sea fault
Highlights
The 1000-km-long left-lateral Dead Sea fault (Fig. 1) marks the boundary between the Arabian Plate and the Sinai block (Quennell 1959; Freund et al 1968; Garfunkel et al 1981; Klinger et al 2000a)
The total destruction of the city of Aila and of its local irrigation system (Zilberman et al 2005; Ambraseys 2009) added to the strength of shaking in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and to the surface rupture evidenced in our trench suggest that the 1068 March 18 earthquake was located in the southern Wadi Araba (Fig. 7)
We present a site located at the southern end of the on-land part of the Dead Sea fault where we could identify up to nine events grouped in eight bursts of activity, over a period of about 5000 yr
Summary
The 1000-km-long left-lateral Dead Sea fault (Fig. 1) marks the boundary between the Arabian Plate and the Sinai block (Quennell 1959; Freund et al 1968; Garfunkel et al 1981; Klinger et al 2000a). The total destruction of the city of Aila and of its local irrigation system (Zilberman et al 2005; Ambraseys 2009) added to the strength of shaking in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and to the surface rupture evidenced in our trench suggest that the 1068 March 18 earthquake was located in the southern Wadi Araba (Fig. 7) This earthquake would have ruptured, at least, the fault segments located between our site and the Gulf of Aqaba, that is about 30 km southward, leading to a magnitude Mw 6.5 or higher (Wells & Coppersmith 1994), in good agreement with values proposed earlier, based on macroseismic reports and geomorphological observations (Abou Karaki 1987; Klinger et al 2000b; Amit et al 2002; Zilberman et al 2005). These correlations are only qualitative at this point, they substantiate the assumption that the Dead Sea fault might be rupturing during seismic crises when several large earthquakes break different sections of the fault over a short period of a few centuries, separated by more quiet periods
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