Structural and geomorphic features accommodating groundwater of Al-Madinah City, Saudi Arabia

Al-Madinah City is located in the western part of Saudi Arabia on the Arabian Shield. The area underwent several tectonic events that developed its structural and geomorphic features, such as the Infracambrian Najd strike-slip faults, development of the Cenozoic basaltic flows of Northern Harrat Rahat, and Cenozoic N–S and E–W transtensional faults, related to the Red Sea rifting. These successive events formed a deltaic-shaped basin of Al-Madinah. The Al-Madinah basin is part of a 400 × 150-km 2 Wadi Qanah–Al-Hamd watershed, which exhibits mainly parallel drainage pattern. Sub-basins, within the main basin, exhibit trellised and radial drainage patterns. The trellised drainage pattern reflects control of the Cenozoic faults, whereas the radial drainage pattern reflects volcanic-related system. Rotation of the Arabian Plate after several extensional events that lead to the opening of the Red Sea influenced the drainage flow to be going from east to west. This geological history that include eruption, normal faulting, and erosion prior to and during the Red Sea rifting formed relief inversion geomorphology of Tertiary basalts that cap Precambrian rocks of the Ayr and Jammah Mountains in western Al-Madinah. The groundwater in the central area is part of the northern Harrat Rahat basaltic aquifer in which the groundwater level rises up in the central area due to the blocking of groundwater flow by constructions below the central area and due to reduced groundwater abstraction. Building a dam 60 km northwest of Al-Madinah would preserve more surface water than the Al-Bayda dam, in which all main valleys join in at the suggested location.