Neotectonics of the Sea of Galilee (northeast Israel): implication for geodynamics and seismicity along the Dead Sea Fault system

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The Sea of Galilee in northeast Israel is a freshwater lake filling a morphological depression along the Dead Sea Fault. It is located in a tectonically complex area, where a N-S main fault system intersects secondary fault patterns non-univocally interpreted by previous reconstructions. A set of multiscale geophysical, geochemical and seismological data, reprocessed or newly collected, was analysed to unravel the interplay between shallow tectonic deformations and geodynamic processes. The result is a neotectonic map highlighting major seismogenic faults in a key region at the boundary between the Africa/Sinai and Arabian plates. Most active seismogenic displacement occurs along NNW-SSE oriented transtensional faults. This results in a left-lateral bifurcation of the Dead Sea Fault forming a rhomb-shaped depression we named the Capharnaum Trough, located off-track relative to the alleged principal deformation zone. Low-magnitude (ML = 3–4) epicentres accurately located during a recent seismic sequence are aligned along this feature, whose activity, depth and regional importance is supported by geophysical and geochemical evidence. This case study, involving a multiscale/multidisciplinary approach, may serve as a reference for similar geodynamic settings in the world, where unravelling geometric and kinematic complexities is challenging but fundamental for reliable earthquake hazard assessments.