Rifting‐Driven Magmatism Along the Dead Sea Continental Transform Fault

Abstract

The Dead Sea Fault (DSF) is a crustal sharp-cut (Rosenthal et al., 2019) continental transform fault running for more than a thousand kilometers spreading to the Red Sea toward the South and bridging with collision in Turkey. This prominent geological feature was a major morphological corridor that allowed the migration of Hominids from Africa into Eurasia (Ben-avraham et al., 2005). The DSF, active since the Miocene (Matmon et al., 2003;Nuriel et al., 2012), is characterized by extensional structures such as the Dead Sea (Hofstetter et al., 2000) and the Sea of Galilee (SoG) (Hurwitz et al., 2000). The SoG developed within the Kinarot-Beit-Shean pull-apart basin where the sedimentary infill thickens toward the Eastern border of the DSF (Magri et al., 2015). Across Northern Israel and around the SoG, sediments alternate with magmatic formations as confirmed by deep-penetrating wells and geophysical data (including active seismic, magnetic field modeling and gravimetry) (