Detrital zircon and rutile U–Pb, Hf isotopes and heavy mineral assemblages of Israeli Miocene sands: Fingerprinting the Arabian provenance of the Levant

Abstract

The Oligocene-Miocene period was a time of significant tectonic and paleogeographic changes in the Levant area. The formation of the Afro-Arabian dome and the rifting along the Red Sea -Gulf of Suez, which started in the late Oligocene, culminated in the early Miocene with the separation of the Arabian from the African plates (Bohannon et al., 1989;Omar & Steckler, 1995). Soon afterwards, continued northward drift of both the African and newly formed Arabian plates have led to collision with the Eurasian plate along the Bitlis-Zagros thrust zone (Okay et al., 2010;