Fig. 3: Bathymetric and tectonic setting of the NEOM Brine Pools in the Gulf of Aqaba.
From: Discovery of the deep-sea NEOM Brine Pools in the Gulf of Aqaba, Red Sea
a The General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans90 (GEBCO) provides regional context to the multibeam data acquired during the OceanX-NEOM research cruise (b). The brine pool is located at the toe-of-slope of the Saudi coastal margin in the Aragonese Deep, a pull-apart basin and the deepest point in the Gulf. This basin is bounded by the strike-slip Arona and Aragonese faults (red lines) which connect via normal faults (black lines). The NEOM pools situate at the junction between the coast-parallel Arona Fault and the NNW-trending normal fault that extends to demark the northern margin of the basin. c The brine-seawater interface is at 1770 m depth and the main pool is 260 m long, 70 m wide, and covers an area of 10,000 m2 (large blue polygon). Echo soundings (black dots) indicate a maximum thickness of the brine to be 6 m in the center of the pool. Three minor pools, each <10 m2 in area, were discovered within 50 m of the main pool, one westward and two southward (small blue polygons).
