During the Pleistocene, glacio-eustatic sea-level falls repeatedly exposed continental shelves, generating lowstand shorelines and incised valleys on many passive margins. On the Levant margin, however, the morphological imprint of these sea-level changes on the continental shelf remains poorly documented. It is still unclear whether lowstand conditions produced a network of incised valleys or mainly reworked an exposed coastal plain.
This study reconstructs submerged paleo-shorelines on the Israeli Levant shelf to evaluate how relative sea level at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) influenced coastal morphology and fluvial–marine transitions. High-resolution 3D seismic volumes (spanning circa 60 by 5 km) along the southern Levant were interpreted using spectral decomposition and additional seismic attributes. We set out to image thinly bedded lowstand deposits and key stratigraphic surfaces that pinching out at presumed shorelines.
Mapping of the LGM correlated surface, when global sea level stood roughly 120 m below present, does not reveal deeply incised channel forms typical of classic lowstand valleys. We focus on a single case, where the surface preserves detectable localized coastal geomorphological elements, including a laterally continuous sand body approximately 1.25 km long and 170 m wide. This is interpreted as a sand spit. An embayment shape is also detected, expressed as a ridge-bounded feature or tombolo, about 1.25 km long and 700 m wide that dips seaward at ~1°.
The geometry, scale and along-strike variability of these elements may indicate a wave and tide influenced coastal system in which marine reworking outpaced fluvial incision or cementation of shifting sands across the exposed shelf during lowstand. These observations suggest that, in this sector of the Levant margin, lowstand sea-level fall reorganized shoreline position and nearshore sediment pathways without producing a well-defined network of shelf-incised valleys.