- Wednesday, February 23, 2011
- Published at:Islamic University Journal of Natural Studies and Engineering)
- Radwan El-Kelani and Isam Jardaneh
Abstract. The city of Nablus is located in one of the highest seismic hazard areas in Palestine, and many buildings were completely destroyed in the city during the historical earthquakes. The population of Nablus city is rapidly increasing and new urbanizing areas are growing to the eastern and western parts where they are located at soft sediments. Consequently, the evaluation of surface soil effects is very important from a standpoint of earthquake disaster mitigation. A landform classification geotechnical map was modified by analyzing available boreholes logs and seismic refraction data. Microtremor measurements were carried out at about 16 sites in the study area and Nakamura’s method (1989) was applied for determining predominant periods. The results showed that predominant period, determined at rock site in different locations of the city, is about 0.55 sec whereas at soft soil sites, in the center of the city, the pred
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- Monday, May 24, 2010
- Published at:American Geophysical Union (AGU), in press.
- Fault/shear zones (FZ) are the locations where movement within the Earth occurs and where motion of tectonic plates, often associated with earthquakes, is accommodated. Despite a rapid increase in the understanding of faults in the last decades our knowledge of their form and their controlling processes remains incomplete. The central questions addressed here, studying the Dead Sea Transform (DST) in the Middle East in detail, are: (1) What is the structure and dynamics of a large fault zone? (2) What controls its structure and dynamics? and (3) How does the FZ studied compare to other large fault zones?
The DST has accommodated left-lateral transform motion of 105 km between the African and Arabian plates since early Miocene (≈20 My). The DST segment between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea, called Arava/Araba Fault (AF), is studied using a multi-disciplinary and multi-scale approach from µm to plate tectonic scale.
We show first, that under the DST a narrow, sub-vertical zone cuts th
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- Friday, June 19, 2009
- Published at:Geophysical Journal International, in press.
- As part of the DESIRE project a 235 km long seismic wide-angle reflection / refraction (WRR) profile was completed in spring 2006 across the Dead Sea Transform (DST) in the region of the southern Dead Sea basin. The DST with a total of about 107 km multi-stage left-lateral shear since about 18 Ma ago, accommodates the movement between the Arabian and African plates. It connects the spreading centre in the Red Sea with the Taurus collision zone in Turkey over a length of about 1100 km. With a sedimentary infill of about 10 km in places, the southern Dead Sea basin is the largest pull-apart basin along the DST and one of the largest pull-apart basins on Earth. The WRR measurements comprised 11 shots recorded by 200 three-component and 400 one-component instruments spaced 300 m to 1.2 km apart along the whole length of the E-W trending profile. Models of the P-wave velocity structure derived from the WRR data show that the sedimentary infill associated with the formation of the southern Dead Sea basin is about 8
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- Tuesday, December 16, 2008
- Published at:American Geophysical Union (AGU).
- This geo-scientific research focuses on the geological setting of the Dead Sea Transform (DST) and the Dead Sea Basin (DSB) and its resulting pull-apart basins. Since the late 1970s, crustal scale geophysical experiments have been carried out in this region. However, the nature of the crust underlying the eastern and western shoulders of the DSB and underneath the DST itself is still a hotly debated topic among researchers. To address one of the central questions of plate tectonics – How do large transform systems work and what are their typical features? – An international geoscientific Dead Sea Integrated Research project (DESIRE) is being conducted by colleagues from Germany, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan.
In order to provide a high resolution gravity database that support 3D numerical modeling and hence a more comprehensive understanding of the nature and segmentation of the DST, an airborne gravity survey as a part of the DESIRE project has been carried out from February to March 2007.
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- Monday, December 15, 2008
- Published at:American Geophysical Union (Fall Meeting), San Francisco
- network was operated in the Southern Dead Sea area as a co-operation between the GFZ Germany, GII Israel, NRA Jordan and An-Najah National Univer-sity Palestine. From October 2006 to March 2008 about 65 short period (38) and broadband (27) instruments recorded continuously the seismicity of the Dead Sea basin. This investiga-tion aims in studying the deeper structure of the Dead Sea area based on the distribution of the local seismicity. About 500 local events have been recorded and more than 300 have been processed up to now. A dominant feature in this first part of the dataset we found a cluster of 78 earthquakes, occurring in February 2007, including multiplets. We determined a 1D-reference model of P- and S-velocities using Velest (Kissling et al., 1994). The model shows a high velocity increase between 6 and 10 km depth. This could be related to a prominent reflector found in the results of the wide angle reflection experiment in the area in 2006 (Mechie et al., 2008). The station corrections suggest a 2
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