The first network of Ocean Bottom Seismometers in the Red Sea to investigate the Zabargad Fracture Zone

The Red Sea (RS) is an ideal natural laboratory to study the transition from continental rifting to seafloor spreading because it is one of the youngest rift basins on Earth. The RS is an ultra-slow spreading rift with an opening rate that decreases from 15 mm/yr in the south, at the Nubian-Arabian-Danakil triple junction, to 7 mm/yr in the north where it connects to the Dead Sea transform fault. While the southern RS has a well-developed seafloor spreading ridge with an axis parallel to the rift bounding faults, images of the northern RS seafloor provide limited information because of thick evaporite layers covering the main tectonic features. Nevertheless, the northern rift axis is geometrically different as it is more oblique to the bounding faults than in the south. Furthermore, the transition between the southern and northern RS is sharp with a ~100 km rift axis offset, named Zabargad Fracture Zone (ZFZ). However, the current knowledge of the seismic activity, transform fault configuration, and the crustal and upper mantle structure of the ZFZ area is too limited to assess the seismic hazard associated with this rift offset and understand the role of the ZFZ in the RS development.

To fill this gap, we deployed the first broadband seismic network in the Red Sea, within the ZFZ, from November 2021 to November 2022. This network included 12 Lobster OBSs from the DEPAS pool (equipped with Güralp CMG-40T-OBS sensors), 2 additional Trillium Compact sensors deployed directly on the seafloor mounted on minimalist frames through a collaboration with the company Fugro, as well as 2 Trillium Compact Horizon and 2 posthole sensors deployed on islands and inland in Saudi Arabia, respectively.

The overall data recovery rate is above 90%. Also, our preliminary data analysis confirms some of the known issues of the Lobster OBSs and their sensors (strong self-noise at periods >10 s of the Güralp sensors and high-frequency harmonic noise due to head-buoy cable strumming). Furthermore, we conducted a systematic comparison of the noise recorded by different station configurations. We find that while Lobster OBSs with a head-buoy cable set free to strum generate strong noise at about 10 Hz and its overtones, Lobster OBSs with tight cable still display harmonic noise from 10 to 40 Hz that increases during bad weather conditions, probably due to resonance of other OBS elements. The Fugro OBSs, despite their minimalist deployment setup, show noise at 40 Hz that also resonates in bad weather. All the OBSs also display a peak of noise between 0.5 and 5 Hz (separated from the secondary microseismic peak). While such a noise peak is not recorded by the inland stations, it is well exhibited by the two island stations suggesting that this is due to locally ocean-generated seismic waves, but not by the OBS frames. At periods >10 s, the Fugro OBSs perform as well as the island and inland stations. In fact, waveforms of teleseismic earthquakes recorded by the Fugro OBSs and island and inland stations have comparable signal-to-noise ratios.