Kinematics of the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean updated

Abstract: A revised quantitative, internally consistent, kinematic model has been determined for the present-day relative plate motions in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions, based on a combination of geological and GPS data. The relative motions of the brittle upper crust of the African and Arabian plates across the southern Dead Sea Fault Zone (DSFZ) are represented by relative rotation at 0.278 ¡ Ma-1 about an Euler pole at 31.1¡N 26.7¡E. The resulting predicted slip rate on the southern DSFZ is 4.0 mm a-1. The kinematics of the northern DSFZ are described as relative rotation at 0.243 ¡ Ma-1 about the same Euler pole, the difference in rotation rates reflecting the absorption of a small component of the relative motion by distributed shortening in the Palmyra fold belt. The northern DSFZ, in Syria and southern Turkey, is regarded as a series of transpressional stepovers, along which the rate of left-lateral slip is substantially less than the rate of relative plate motion, because this slip is oriented strongly obliquely to the relative motion between the adjoining plates. This geometry seems to result in part from some strands of the northern DSFZ reactivating older fault segments, even though they were not optimally oriented relative to the plate motion, and in part because the ideal initial geometry of the DSFZ, which would have continued northwestward offshore of the Levant coastline towards Cyprus, was precluded by the high strength of the crust along this line. The revised slip rate on the East Anatolian Fault Zone (EAFZ) is estimated as ~8 mm a-1. At this rate, restoring the observed slip requires the age of the EAFZ to be ~4 Ma. Th