ABSTRACT
The northern Red Sea is a young ocean basin located at the leading tip of the active Gulf of Aden-Red Sea rift system, which separates the African Plate from the Arabian Plate that is moving northward and subducting under the Eurasian Plate along the NW trending Bitlis–Zagros suture in northern Iraq and northern Iran. The NW Red Sea basin connects in the north to the Gulf of Suez rift and the Aqaba-Levant transform fault system. This northern Red Sea is considered to be a potential model of how the continental lithosphere first ruptures and extends to form a proto-ocean basin. In this review chapter, we summarise the tectono-stratigraphic evolution of the northwestern Red Sea margin based primarily on our extensive, detailed, field mapping onshore, focusing on the extensional fault networks, fault segmentation and linkage patterns, together with the stratigraphy and the basement fabrics that clearly influence the margin architecture. Many recent publications have focused on the northern Red Sea system, mainly using potential field data, but there is very limited good quality publicly available seismic data, only a few wells, as well as a widespread, thick syn-rift to post-rift blanket of evaporites. These factors have hindered definitive interpretations of the offshore basin architectures as well as the deep crustal architectures and compositions of the highly extended lithosphere in the northern Red Sea. We have used our studies of the northwestern Red Sea margin and the Gulf of Suez together with the voluminous literature on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Suez to propose an evolutionary hyper-extension model for the Gulf of Suez and NW Red Sea. Our proposed cross-sections have been modelled numerically using modern, process-based, algorithms developed for simulating the tectono-stratigraphic evolution of passive margins - from the early rift stages to full ocean basins. These models, however, need to be tested by new seismic refraction data, by deep exploration wells, as well as by public release of existing high-quality 3D seismic data that are currently confidential.
