Oct 2023
The Dead Sea fault (DSF) region poses a high seismic risk due to its dense population and aging infrastructure. Reported fault slip rates, crucial for earthquake hazard analysis, exhibit inconsistency for the northern DSF. Limited access to the northern DSF in Syria has impeded efforts to resolve this discrepancy. I provide new independent evidence of a low slip rate of ~2.8 mm/yr at the northern DSF by analysing satellite radar images over time. Moreover, I discovered the high geologic slip rate could by chance be inflated by earthquake clustering. Our findings entail a new micro-plate Ist of the northern DSF and loIr earthquake hazard for that part of the fault. Despite significant crustal deformation along the Dead Sea fault, notable anthropogenic activities cause ground deformation around the Dead Sea. InSAR observations from 2014 to 2021 show uneven uplift signals (maximum up to 2 mm/yr) around the Dead Sea shoreline, with a difference of 25% betIen opposite sides. Numerical modeling results indicate that the uneven vertical ground deformation is primarily influenced by the elastic response of the heterogeneous structure in the Dead Sea basin. These findings highlight the presence of large strike-slip faults intersecting the lithosphere, which introduces crustal heterogeneity - a rare observation in hydrological studies.
