The Northern end of the Dead Sea Basin: Geometry from reflection seismic evidence Abdallah S. Al-Zoubi a, ⁎ , Till Heinrichs b , Isam Qabbani c , Uri S. ten-Brink d a Al-Balqa' Applied University, Faculty of Engineering, Surveying & Geomatics Department, Salt, 19117, Jordan b Goettingen University, Geoscience Center, Department of Applied Geology, Germany c Natural Resources Authority, Amman, Jordan d U.S. Geological Survey, Woods Hole Science Center, Woods Hole, MA 02543, USA Received 30 August 2006; received in revised form 28 December 2006; accepted 8 February 2007 Available online 22 February 2007 Abstract Recently released reflection seismic lines from the Eastern side of the Jordan River north of the Dead Sea were interpreted by using borehole data and incorporated with the previously published seismic lines of the eastern side of the Jordan River. For the first time, the lines from the eastern side of the Jordan River were combined with the published reflection seismic lines from the western side of the Jordan River. In the complete cross sections, the inner deep basin is strongly asymmetric toward the Jericho Fault supporting the interpretation of this segment of the fault as the long-lived and presently active part of the Dead Sea Transform. There is no indication for a shift of the depocenter toward a hypothetical eastern major fault with time, as recently suggested. Rather, the north-eastern margin of the deep basin takes the form of a large flexure, modestly faulted. In the N–S-section along its depocenter, the floor of the basin at its northern end appears to deepen continuously by roughly 0.5 km over 10 km distance, without evidence of a transverse fault. The asymmetric and gently-dipping shape of the basin can be explained by models in which the basin is located outside the area of overlap between en-echelon strike-slip faults. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Dead Sea Basin; Pull-apart basin; Basin asymmetry; Transform fault 1. Introduction The Dead Sea Basin (DSB) is assumed to be one of the largest and deepest pull-apart basins in the world and considered as a classic example for such structure (Aydin and Nur, 1982; Allen and Allen, 1990). It is located within the Dead Sea Rift which is a transform type plate boundary separating the Arabian and Sinai plates while connecting the spreading zone of the Red Sea in the South to the Taurus collision zone in the north (Fig. 1A). The Dead Sea Transform is a left lateral shear, which started in the Miocene, with an accumulative lateral displacement of 105 km (Quennell, 1958; Freund et al., 1970; Garfunkel, 1981). The DSB with all its subbasins is about 150 km long and about 20 km wide. It is composed of two main segments. The northern segment is covered by a lake, while the southern is subaerial. However, the basin appears to end north of the lake in a smaller and narrower sub-basin, the Jericho/Shuna basin, which is the focus of the current investigation. The southern Dead Sea Basin has been explored and investigated intensively over the last four decades (see Tectonophysics 434 (2007) 55 – 69 www.elsevier.com/locate/tecto ⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +962 777 63 01 33; fax: +962 5 353 23 92. E-mail address: aalzoubi@go.com.jo (A.S. Al-Zoubi). 0040-1951/$ - see front matter © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.tecto.2007.02.007