INVESTIGATION OF THE POTENTIAL OF OSL FOR DATING QANATS AND MEASURING THE SLIP-RATE OF THE DASHT-EBAYAZ EARTHQUAKE FAULT

Ancient Persians overcame the climatic change by constructing elaborate tunnel systems called qanat for extracting groundwater in the dry mountain basins, which allowed farmers to succeed when access to surface water was limited or impossible. Although some archaeologists suppose the Romans had invented the qanat system, written records and recent excavations suggest that ancient Iran was its actual birthplace.In most seismic regions, the earthquake faults are located at the boundary of plains and mountains where streams or qanats provide water and fertile soil for settlement and agriculture. In some parts of Iran, such as Dasht-e-Bayaz, the line of wells of the qanat systems have been displaced by faulting. If we can date the age of these qanat wells and measure the amount of offset, we can estimate the slip-rate of the fault, which is an important factor for Earthquake hazard assessment. The existing constraints on age of ancient qanats in Iran are typically assigned from archaeological investigations of nearby habitation sites. We present for the first time the results of OSL dating from spoil deposits associated with the Dasht-e-Bayaz qanats. We therefore explore the possibility of dating qanat directly using the novel method of OSL

کلیدواژه ها:

Dasht-E-Bayaz Fault ، Qanat ، OSL Dating ، SAR