Introduction

• Conference history

This conference has been held before in the United Arab Emirates, the Sultanate of Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Yemen. Currently, the conference is held every two years in a country in the Gulf Cooperation Council, and it was postponed in 2022 due to the occurrence of the Corona virus pandemic. The conference has been held eleven times previously.

The conference brings together the international experts in the fields of seismology and earthquake engineering to capitalize their experience toward improving the state-of-the-art technologies in these fields and providing mitigation measures to reduce the human sufferings and material loss around world and the Arabian Gulf region in particular. The conferences provided an opportunity for scientists and engineers to present relevant results, to propose potential collaborations, and identify areas requiring additional research. A number of important outcomes and recommendations have resulted from the previous conferences and will be addressed in this conference, hosted by the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, Kuwait. Papers and research dealing with topics of seismology, earthquake engineering, seismic hazard mitigation and geophysical research in the Arabian Peninsula region are welcomed at Gulf Seismic Conference 2024.

 

• Seismicity and seismotectonic background

the human losses left by earthquakes during this century and the past century, as the death toll resulting from earthquakes reached more than two and half millions people around the world, in addition to their devastating effects on vital facilities, infrastructure. The Arabian Gulf region has previously been exposed to many strong earthquakes, whether local or regional, from the famous Zagros seismic belt in Iran.

Seismotectonically, the continent-continent collision between Arabia and Eurasia led to the development of the Zagros Mountain Belt and the Eastern Anatolian Plateau. Furthermore, opening of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in the Miocene- Pliocene times has set the initial stages for an Arabian plate separation from “mother” Africa plate. Continued motion of Arabia towards the north and northeast resulted in further separation of Arabia from Africa along the Dead Sea Fault System in the Pliocene times. Seismic activity recorded by networks both within and external to the Arabian plate shows high concentration of earthquakes along Arabian plate boundaries, examples include the Zagros Mountain Belt, and the Dead Sea Fault System. This pattern is strongly evident by recent and historic devastating earthquakes that claimed the lives of many hundreds to thousands of people, examples of those still resonate in our minds, such as the Iraq-Iran border earthquake 2017, the Aqaba Earthquake, 1985 and the Bam Earthquake in Iran, 2003. Earthquakes do not recognize geographic or political borders, their damaging effects are regional, a perfect example of this, is the Sumatra earthquake 2004, which generated tsunami that swept the Indian Ocean from Sumatra to India, to Somalia, and to Oman where 2-4 meters run-up were measured in the Salalah coastal areas.