GNGTS 2022 - Atti del 40° Convegno Nazionale

GNGTS 2022 Sessione 1.1 71 THE SEA OF GALILEE (NORTHEAST ISRAEL), A PROMISING SITE FOR STUDYING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SEISMICITY AND FLUID-FLOW L. Gasperini 1 , M. Lazar 2 , A. Polonia 1 1 Istituto di Scienze Marine, CNR, Bologna 2 University of Haifa, Israel The Sea of Galilee (SoG) in northeast Israel (Fig. 1) is a freshwater lake located within a morphological depression along the Dead Sea Fault (DSF) system, in a tectonically complex area (Ben-Avraham et al., 1996). In fact, it lays where the N-S main fault system intersects a secondary pattern of NW-SE oriented faults which cause transtensive shear and strain partition along an area wider relative to the Dead Sea Fault principal displacement zone. A multiscale geophysical-geochemical survey led to the compilation of a new tectonic map of the Sea of Galilee region, at the boundary between the Africa/Sinai and Arabian plates, showing that the present-day most evident deformations occur along NNW-SSE oriented transtensional faults, forming a left-lateral bifurcation of Dead Sea Fault system and a rhomb-shaped depression called the Capharnaum Trough (Gasperini et al. , 2020). Low-magnitude (Ml=3-4) epicenters during recent seismic sequences are aligned along this feature, whose activity is highlighted by geophysical and geochemical observations (Haddad et al. , 2020). High-resolution seismic reflection data indicate the widespread occurrence of gas-bearing sediments at the lake subseafloor (Lazar et al. , 2019), as well as fluid and gas escapes in correspondence of the main tectonic features (Gasperini et al., 2020). Large magnitude destructive earthquakes have struck the SoG region throughout historical times, as reported by modern paleoseismological and archeoseismological studies (e.g., Galli, 1999; Wechsler et al. , 2018). Fig. 1 - The Sea of Galilee along the Dead Sea Faults System. a) Satellite photo from Google Earth; b) morphotectonic map.