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Which tectonic plate movements helped create the Dead Sea depression?

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White salt deposits cover rocks along the shore of the Dead Sea near Masada, Israel, with green water and dramatic cloudy sky in the background. — Dead Sea Salt deposits at the Dead Sea near Masada, Israel.

The Dead Sea depression was formed during the Miocene Epoch (approximately 23 million to 5.3 million years ago) as a result of the collision between the Arabian Plate and the Eurasian Plate to the north.1

This tectonic interaction caused the upheaval of the seabed, which produced the upfolded structures of the Transjordanian highlands and the central range of Palestine. These movements created the fractures that allowed the Dead Sea graben—a downfaulted block of the Earth's crust—to drop. The region is situated between transform faults along a tectonic plate boundary that extends northward from the Red Sea–Gulf of Suez spreading centre to a convergent plate boundary in the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey.1