Abstract
The Dead Sea Transform (DST) is a major plate boundary separating
the African and Arabian plates. It extends over 1000 km from the
Red Sea rift in the south to the Taurus collision zone in the north.
Present-day left-lateral motion is 4 +-2 mm/year which is consistent
with the kinematics of the Arabian plate assuming a rotation rate
of about 0.4 deg/Ma around a pole at 31.1N and 26.7E relative to
Africa (Klinger et al., 2000a). The DST became active about 18-21
Ma ago and since then, it has accommodated about 100 km of left-lateral
slip (Garfunkel et al., 1981; Courtillot et al., 1987). In the area
between the Dead Sea and Red Sea the DST is marked by the Arava fault
which may have the potential to produce Mw 7 earthquakes along some
of its segments about every 200 years (Klinger et al., 2000b). The
aim of the interdisciplinary and multi-scale Dead Sea Rift Transect
(DESERT) project (DESERT Group, 2000) is to shed light on the question
of how large shear zones work. DESERT consists of several geophysical
sub-projects that are carried out by partners in Germany, Israel,
Jordan and Palestine. Principal investigators are Michael Weber in
Germany, Zvi Ben-Avraham in Israel, Khalil Abu-Ayyash in Jordan,
and Radwan El-Kelani in the Palestine Territories. One of the sub-projects
was a large-scale passive seismic experiment which was conducted
in Israel, Jordan, and the territory of the Palestinian Authority.
Aims of the project are (a) study of crust and mantle structure with
the receiver function (RF) method, (b) travel-time tomography, (c)
to investigate azimuthal anisotropy in crust and upper mantle from
shear wave splitting, and (d) the study of local seismicity. In this
note, we give a brief overview on the field experiment and the data
archiving procedure.
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