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The 'Jordan Rift Valley' ( ''Al-Ghor'' or ''Al-Ghawr'') is a 375-kilometer (km) long strike-slip fault zone some 5 kilometers wide in the north and 23 kilometers wide in the south Increasing Importance of the Jordan Rift Buffer David Eshel that forms part of the broader Great Rift Valley.^[1] Located in modern-day Israel, Jordan, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, this geographic region includes the Jordan River, Hula Valley, Lake Tiberias and the Dead Sea, features created by the physiographic and geologic process underway. Overview of Middle East Water Resources Water Data Banks Project A vertical displacement of more than 3000 meters has been caused by underlying faults, accounting for the area's unique climate and hydrology.

Contents

Origins and physical features

Dead Sea Rift

References

Origins and physical features

A 2003 satellite image of the region showing the Jordan Rift Valley

The Great Rift Valley was formed many million years ago in the Miocene epoch when the Arabian tectonic plate moved northward and then eastward away from Africa. Dead sea rapidly disappearing as River Jordan dries up William Reville About three million years ago the valley of the Dead Sea was flooded by the Mediterranean Sea. One million year later, the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan Rift Valley rose so that the sea water stopped flooding the area. The long bay eventually became an inland lake, the origins of the Dead Sea, which is fed mainly by the Jordan River which enters the lake from the north.
The lowest point in the Jordan Rift Valley is at the shores of the Dead Sea, which is also the lowest point on the surface of the earth at 400 meters below sea level. Rising sharply to almost 1,000 meters in the west, and similarly in the east, the rift is a significant topographic feature over which few narrow paved roads and difficult mountain tracks lead. The valley north of the Dead Sea has long been a site of agriculture because of water available from the Jordan River and numerous springs located on the valley's flanks.

Dead Sea Rift

The Dead Sea Rift is located within the Dead Sea Transform,^[2] a plate boundary separating the Arabian plate from the African plate and connecting the divergent plate boundary in the Red Sea to the convergent plate boundary in the Red Sea to the convergent plate boundary in the Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey^[3].
The interpretation of the tectonic regime that led to the development of the Dead Sea Rift is highly contested. Some consider it as a transform fault that accommodates a 105 km northwards displacement of the Arabian plate,^[4] and trace its structural evolution to the early Miocene. Others presume that the Rift is an incipient oceanic spreading center, the northern extension of the Red Sea tectonic spreading center,^[5] and the displacement along it is oblique, with approximately 10-15 km of extension and a similar amount of sinistral strike-slip. The evolution of the rift, according to this latter model, started in the late Miocene with the linear series of basins that propagated gradually along their axes to form the present rift valley.^[6] The occurrence of a system of rivers that flowed from northern Arabia to the Mediterranean in the latest Miocene supports the acceptance of the extensional origin and mostly post-mid-Miocene age of the Dead Sea Rift.

References

1. The Jordan Rift Valley, A. Horowitz, , , Department of Archeaology, Tel Aviv University, ,
2. Attallah, M. 1991. Origin and evaluation of The Dead Sea. In: Geothe-Institut, Geology of Jordan, Al Kutba Publishes.
3. Barberi, F., Capaldi, G., Gasperini, R., Marinelli, G., Santacrose R. Scandone, R., Treuil, M., and Vaert, J. 1980. Recent basaltic volcanism of Jordan and its implications on the geodynamic history of the Dead Sea shear zone. Int. Symp. Geodynamic of the afro-Arabian Rift System (Rome), pp. 667-682.
4. e.g. Freund et al., 1970; Jaffe and Garfunkel, 1987
5. Horowitz, 2001
6. Mart, 1994