but is up to deep, with the nearby mountains near in height. This difference in elevation suggests that the tectonic activity outpaces the erosive processes in the area, but the background seismicity is infrequent and is marked by earthquake swarms. Stress triggering The earthquake was the largest event to occur on along the DST during the 20th century and was felt up to away. The period of aftershocks carried on for over a year with many exceeding magnitude 5. Within several hours of the mainshock a number of small earthquakes occurred along the DST north of the epicenter. Analysis of these earthquakes suggest that they may have been remotely triggered by the Gulf of Aqaba mainshock. Much attention has been given to remotely triggered earthquakes since the 1992 Landers earthquake in southern California. The Dead Sea fault system runs from the Red Sea north to a triple junction in south-central Turkey and consists of a main fault and several secondary faults. The fault system is at its widest and deepest in the gulf where a transition from proto-oceanic rifting to transform faulting occurs. Moving northward through Lebanon and Syria, where the DST is known as the Yammouneh fault, the trace follows a restraining bend and splits into several strands that include the Serghaya and Rachaya faults. These strands are believed to be the source of the Near East earthquakes of 1759. The increased seismic activity following the Aqaba earthquake was detected by the Syrian National Seismic Network (SNSN) and occurred in the area of the Serghaya and Rachaya faults within a area near the restraining bend in southwest Syria. The SNSN consists of twenty vertical-component seismometers, but only nine instruments recorded the swarm. This small area in southwest Syria situated 500 km north of the Gulf of Aqaba mainshock had almost no activity during the two previous months then, beginning two hours and 47 minutes after the event, a swarm of 21 small earthquakes occurred. The average background seismicity was .5 to 1 events per day preceding November 22, and during the swarm 21 small earthquakes with a peak magnitude of (Md = 3.7) were recorded in three and a half hours. Randa Mohamad (from the Syrian National Seismological Center) and other seismologists determined that the abrupt increase of activity was due to remote earthquake triggering from the Gulf of Aqaba mainshock, and reported the results of their investigation in