U.S. Geological Survey, Woods Hole Science Center
Peace and Science in the Middle East
The ancient cultures of the Middle East and the modern political conflicts there are shaped by a surprisingly diverse and youthful landscape. The landscape of the region is dominated by the rift valley, a 20-30 km wide valley that is sunk between the western highlands of Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and the eastern highlands of Jordan. Much of the rift valley is below sea level, including the deepest point on the Earth surface, the Dead Sea at –420 meters (-1370 ft.). The topographic barriers were significant enough to help create different kingdoms and cultures, yet not significant enough to prevent interaction among these cultures through commerce and war. The north-south oriented rift valley was also an important migration route for early humans, and is still a migration route for flora and fauna, particularly, birds, from Africa to Eurasia.
What caused this landscape of a rift valley and the uplifted shoulders? The Dead Sea rift is not a true tectonic rift, but a strike-slip fault system or a continental transform that laterally offsets the Arabian tectonic plate against the African tectonic plate. Other continental transforms, such as the San Andreas and the Northern Anatolian faults, do not exhibit a rift-like topography. Therefore, some other forces or processes must be active here in addition to the lateral displacement of two plates. The Peace Treaty between Jordan and Israel, and the Oslo agreement between Israel and the Palestinians opened the door for scientists to cooperate in projects that tackle this question, although the security situation and the occasional conflicts, still pose substantial hurdles.
The talk will describe the planning, execution, and results of three large-scale geophysical projects to study the Dead Sea rift and its surrounding highlands. In the first project, we detonated 16.5 tons of explosives underground and in the Dead Sea and generated acoustic waves that traveled through the Earth crust to hundreds of seismometers in Jordan and Israel and along their common border. In the second project, a Jordanian military helicopter flew back and forth across the border with Israel and measured the magnetic field over the rift valley. In the third project, we merged the databases of the Earth gravity field in and out of the rift valley Jordan and Israel. These projects gave us surprising and important insights into the structure and deformation of the plate boundary and the depth of the Dead Sea basin. Their benefit also extended to exploration for groundwater and oil, to earthquake hazard assessment, to infrastructure projects, such as the Dead Sea-Red Sea Canal, and even more important, truly promoted peace and friendship among the many people involved.
About Dr. ten Brink
Education
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Geological Sciences, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University (1981 – 1986)
B.Sc., Geology and Physics, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1978 – 1980)
Positions Held
Adjunct Scientist, The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (1999-present)
Geophysicist, U.S. Geological Survey, Woods Hole Field Center (1991-present)
Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University (1991-1996)
Adjunct associate research scientist, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (1989-1992)
Dr. Uri ten Brink graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, in 1980 with a double major in Geology and Physics, and received his Ph.D. in Marine Geophysics from Columbia University in New York in 1986. He was a post-doctoral research affiliate at Tel Aviv University and Stanford University before joining the U.S. Geological Survey - Woods Hole Science Center, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1991. Dr. ten Brink is currently the project chief for Tsunami hazard assessment in the Caribbean, the project chief for the USGS ocean bottom seismometers, and the leader of a group assessing tsunami hazard for the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. In addition, he is an Adjunct Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, and was a Consulting Associate Professor at Stanford University. In these capacities he has mentored and advised many Doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows. Dr. ten Brink co-authored over 100 scientific papers and reports as well as a short movie.
Dr. ten Brink’s scientific interests include plate tectonics, the deformation of the Earth crust, seismic and tsunami hazards, and oceanographic instrumentation. He has worked across the globe in projects as diverse as loading of the earth’s crust by the volcanoes of Hawaii, the uplift of the mountain range that crosses Antarctica, the opening of Lake Baikal, Siberia, The rupture of the Seattle Fault, coastal and offshore California tectonics, the structure of the Puerto Rico trench and its seismic and tsunami hazards, submarine landslides in the Caribbean and the Atlantic, the movement of glaciers on the continental shelf, and various aspects of the tectonics of the Dead Sea rift.
Selected Recent Publications
ten Brink, U.S., A.S. Al-Zoubi, C.H. Flores, Y. Rotstein, I. Qabbani, S.H. Harder, and G.R. Keller, Seismic imaging of deep low-velocity zone beneath the Dead Sea basin and transform fault: Implications for strain localization and crustal rigidity, Geophysical Research Letters, v. 33, L24314, doi:10.1029/2006GL027890, 2006.
ten Brink, U., M. Rybakov, A. Al-Zoubi, M. Hassouneh, A. Batayneh, U. Frieslander, V. Goldschmidt, M. Daoud, Y. Rotstein, and J.K. Hall, The anatomy of the Dead Sea plate boundary: Does it reflect continuous changes in plate motion? Geology, v. 27, pp. 887-980, 1999.
ten Brink, U.S., M. Rybakov, A.S. Al-Zoubi, and Y. Rotstein, The magnetic character of a large continental transform: An aeromagnetic survey of the Dead Sea fault, Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst. (G-Cubed), 8, Q07005, doi:10.1029/2007GC001582, 2007
ten Brink, U.S., Z. Ben-Avraham, R.E. Bell, M. Hassouneh, D.F. Coleman, G. Andreasen, G. Tibor, and B. Coakley, Structure of the Dead Sea pull-apart basin from gravity analyses, J. Geophys. Res., v. 98, pp. 21,877-21,894, 1993.
Steckler, M.S., and U.S. ten Brink, Lithospheric strength variations as a control on new plate boundaries: examples from the northern Red Sea region, Earth. Planet. Sci. Lett., v. 79, pp. 120-132, 1986.
Al-Zoubi, A., and U.S. ten Brink, Salt diapirs in the Dead Sea basin and their relationship to quaternary extensional tectonics, Marine and Petroleum Geology, v. 18, pp. 779-797, 2001.
