Crustal deformation of the southeastern corner of Egypt derived from geodetic data

Abstract

The proper evaluation of the crustal deformation is important prior to any strategic projects. Due to the importance of the southeastern corner of Egypt which contains many mineral resources beside a lot of attractive tourism places, we have selected this area to estimate the recent crustal movements and its relation to earthquake activities within this region using the available GPS and seismicity measurements. We used 19 permanent and campaign GPS sites in and around the study area that cover the time span 2007–2014. Most of these sites are related to Abu-Dabbab and Lake Nasser networks. The obtained GPS results show that there is an observed deformation in Abu-Dabbab area, along Red Sea coast, which characterized by a seismic cluster. The localization of the observed movements at Abu-Dabbab area may indicate that the deformation is related to a local structure within the study area. On the other hand, GPS sites located East of Lake Nasser and the permanent GPS sites in southern Egypt do not show any significant velocity field and it seems to be stable compared to Abu-Dabbab region. Even with the non-uniform spatial resolution of the GPS sites used in this work, our results are in good agreement with the seismicity of the study area.