DEVELOPMENT OF GIS-BASED DATABASE OF ACTIVE FAULTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AREA

The Middle Eastern region is located at the junction of major tectonic plates, namely the African, Arabian and Eurasian plates with relatively high tectonic and seismic activity. Some of the most fatal earthquakes in human history such as Aleppo-Syria, Rudbar -Manjil-Iran and Beirut-Lebanon earthquakes have occurred in this region (Table 1). Earthquake activity in this region is concentrated along active faults or plate boundaries. This study attempts to develop a GIS-based database representing active faults zones for the Middle East area by performing an elaborated investigation on researches and published material on active faults. For that purpose, a digital database has been conducted which provides facility to update and compile information from latest researches. It facilitates efficient organization of faults characteristics such as strike angle, dip angle, fault mechanism, horizontal and vertical slip rates and also covers all publically available researches on seismotectonic and active faults for the Middle East. This integrated database also contains information on historical earthquakes, field observations and photographic images, geo-referenced images and published articles for all known faults within the region under consideration. SRTM digital topographic map layers with 3 second resolution in conjunction with other published seismotectonic data have been used to adjust geographical locations of some of the known faults in this region.

Keywords:

Middle East , Active Faults Map , GIS , Fault Database , Iran SRTM Topographic Map