Current depositional environments at the Dead Sea margins as indicators of past lake levels

The Dead Sea Basin, with its various depositional environments, provides excellent field settings for analyzing sedimentary facies distribution through time and space. This continental rift Basin is bounded by steep escarpments, with narrow zones of onshore environments, including fluvial streams, mudflats, and shore and fan-deltas, as well as a variety of offshore environments. Rapid twentieth century lake-level declines and infrequent lake-level rises, involving modern shoreline regressions and telescoping coarse clastic deltas provide a rare opportunity to combine and compare modern to Pleistocene sedimentary sequences in one Basin. Here we explore the sedimentary attributes of the various depositional environments along the present Dead Sea Basin. Comparison between observed processes and the older depositional systems provides a means for understanding similar depositional systems here and in other rift Basins for purposes of sequence analysis, lakes level reconstruction, and geomorphic response to climate.