3.7.1. Background

The Greater Caucasus and the Levant domains are located in the northern and southern forelands of the Pontides-Lesser Caucasus-Elborz and the Taurides-Zagros orogenic systems, respectively. Together these mark the collision zone of the Arabian and African plates with the Eurasian plate that contains a complex array of Paleotethyan and Neotethyan sutures (Stampfli and Borel, 2004). Neogene crustal and lithospheric over-thickening in this collision zone gave rise to the Middle to Late Miocene activation of the NAFZ (Burchfiel et al., 2000; Yilmaz et al., 2000a) and the latest Miocene activation of the EAFZ (Robertson, 2000) and the onset of westward extrusion of Anatolia. During the Late Miocene the sinistral Dead Sea transform fault was activated (Mart et al., 2005), compensating for differential northward movements between the African and Arabian plates, amounting at present to 10 and 20-24 mm/y, respectively (Jiménez-Munt et al., 2003). As westward extrusion of Anatolia apparently did not fully compensate for the Arabia-Eurasia convergence, compressional stresses building up in the Eurasian foreland of the Lesser Caucasus caused inversion of the Mesozoic Greater Caucasus Trough (Nikishin et al., 2001), a process that commenced in the Early Tertiary and that is presently still ongoing.

Whilst Mount El’brus of the Greater Caucasus peaks at 5642 m above MSL, the surface of the transtensionally subsiding Dead Sea is located at 417 m below MSL. The Caucasus and Levant natural laboratories address the syn-collisional deformation of foreland areas characterized by contrasting high-level neotectonic activity, namely intraplate mountain building in the Caucasus domain involving a rift-related weakened Late Paleozoic crust, and in the Levant domain wrench-rift dominated deformation of a foreland that consists of old continental cratonic and the Neotethyan oceanic lithosphere of the eastern Mediterranean.