![]() ![]() Mohammad, the founder of Islam, grew up in Mecca, a sacred city nestled in the hills that comprise the uplifted eastern flank of the Red Sea Rift, the more purely extensional portion of the plate boundary that lies south of the Dead Sea Transform. © Lon Abbott and Terri Cook.Īs a result of the region’s active tectonism, the Holy Land is filled with distinctive geological and geographic features that govern the events related in many memorable stories contained in the holy literature of all three religious traditions. The ruins of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea at sunrise. The transtensional nature of the transform’s southern portion, where the fault system runs through the centre of the Dead Sea, creates the area’s rift-like horst-and-graben landscape. By contrast, a combination of mantle heat and isostatic flexure has raised the blocks on the adjacent normal fault footwalls to elevations of 700–1,200m above sea level, creating a relatively moister climate that sustains much of the population in both Jordan and Israel. These lie well below sea level because they are on the hanging walls of normal faults that accommodate the small component of divergence produced in the gaps between the left-stepping strike-slip faults. South of Lebanon it consists of a series of left-stepping, en-echelon faults motion along these independent strands has produced 105 km of left-lateral displacement plus a smidge of extension, thereby creating a series of pull-apart basins. This left-lateral strike-slip system runs from the Maras Triple Junction in southern Turkey to the northern end of the Red Sea. This terrain has been largely shaped by the Dead Sea Transform, a major fault system that forms part of the complex boundary between the African and Arabian plates. The history of the world’s three great monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – has unfolded in the so-called Holy Land, a starkly rugged landscape that stretches from the highlands in Jordan to the Mediterranean and Red Seas. The Dead Sea Transform: The Master Sculptor Multiple boundaries develop so that strike-slip ruptures avoid very thick and strong lithosphere.Strike-slip motion – with a dash of divergence – along the Dead Sea transform fault has created a rugged landscape of arid, cliff-girt plateaus towering above the Dead Sea, the lowest exposed point on Earth. ![]() Numerical modeling predicts the development of wide multiple transform boundaries when the age offset is above a threshold value of ∼30 m.y., i.e., in extra-long (>500 km) slow-slip transforms. Some of these events may be triggered by earthquakes from the principal boundary. However, strike-slip seismic events also occur in the second valley and elsewhere in the deformed zone. One of the valleys is seismically highly active and constitutes the present-day principal transform boundary. ![]() Examples are the 750-km- long, 120-km-wide Andrew Bain transform on the Southwest Indian Ridge, and the Romanche transform, where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is offset by a lens-shaped, ∼900-km- long, ∼100-km-wide sliver of deformed lithosphere bound by two major transform valleys. However, we define here a new class of oceanic transform boundaries, with broad complex multifault zones of deformation, similar to some continental strike-slip systems. Oceanic transform plate boundaries consist of a single, narrow (a few kilometers wide) strike-slip seismic zone offsetting two mid-ocean ridge segments. ![]()
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