HR: 0800h
AN: T31A-1283    [Abstracts]
TI: Numerical simulation of the thermo-mechanical processes resulting in the major pull-apart basins at the Dead Sea Transform
AU: * Petrunin, A
EM: alexei@gfz-potsdam.de
AF: GeoForschungsZentrum, Telegrafenberg, Potsdam, 14473 Germany
AU: Sobolev, S
EM: stephan@gfz-potsdam.de
AF: GeoForschungsZentrum, Telegrafenberg, Potsdam, 14473 Germany
AU: Garfunkel, Z
EM: Zvi.Garfunkel@huji.ac.il
AF: Hebrew University, Institute of Earth Sciences, Jerusalem, 91905 Israel
AB: The continental transform boundary between the Arabian and African plates marked by the Dead Sea Transform (DST) accommodated ca 105 km of relative transform displacement during the last 15-20 Myr. The strike-slip deformation resulted in a string of the pull-apart basins along the DST, with up to 10 km thick sedimentary cover. The reconstruction of the pre-DST basement topography indicates that there was a crystalline basement high close to the DST trace between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea, possibly associated with either regionally thicker crust or thinner lithosphere. Moreover, recent seismological data indicate significant variations of the crustal thickness along and across the DST. We employ a fully coupled thermo-mechanical modelling numerical technique to study 3D deformation at the DST with focus on the investigation of the possible effects of inherited heterogeneity of the lithospheric structure on the origin of the two main pull-apart basins in the Southern part of the DST- Gulf of Aqaba and Dead Sea. Our finite-element, explicit, parallel computing code handles realistic temperature-, strain- and stress-dependant visco-elasto-plastic rheology of the lithosphere and is able to model spontaneous self generation of the faults in the upper crust and zones of the strain localization in the lower crust and upper mantle. The modelling shows that both Gulf of Aqaba and Dead Sea basins may have resulted from interaction between deformations imposed by the plate scale kinematics and inherited variations of the thermal structure of the lithosphere (lithospheric thickness) and variations of the crustal thickness. The models replicate major features of the both basins including their shape, depth, number and spacing of the major faults as well as general features of the strain partitioning between the faults.
DE: 8100 TECTONOPHYSICS
DE: 3210 Modeling
DE: 3230 Numerical solutions
SC: Tectonophysics [T]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting