3D Imaging of Dead Sea Area Using Weighted Multipath Summation: A Case Study

Abstract

The formation of sinkholes along the Dead Sea is caused by the rapid decline of the Dead Sea level, as a possible result of human extensive activity. According to one of the geological models, the sinkholes in several sites are clustered along a narrow coastal strip developing along lineaments representing faults in NNW direction. In order to understand the relationship between a developing sinkhole and its tectonic environment, a high-resolution (HR) three-dimensional (3D) seismic reflection survey was carried out at the western shoreline of the Dead Sea. A recently developed 3D imaging approach was applied to this 3D dataset. Imaging of subsurface is performed by a spatial summation of seismic waves along time surfaces using recently proposed multipath summation with proper weights. The multipath summation is performed by stacking the target waves along all possible time surfaces having a common apex at the given point. This approach does not require any explicit information on parameters since the involved multipath summation is performed for all possible parameters values within a wide specified range. The results from processed 3D time volume show subhorizontal coherent reflectors at approximate depth of 50–80 m which incline on closer location to the exposed sinkhole and suggest a possible linkage between revealed fault and the sinkholes.