The Earth’s crustal movements occur at local and regional scale with various intensities that depend on the tectonic settings. Egypt’s surface deformation is controlled by its location. It is located in the northeastern corner of the African continent and affected from the North by the subduction between Nubian and Eurasian plates and from the East by activities along the Red Sea spreading, Gulf of Suez, and Gulf of Aqaba. Away from the tectonic activities, the ground deformation could be triggered by human activities such as artificial lakes, underground water pumping or oil extraction. Estimating the recent crustal movements of the Earth’s crust and its relation to tectonic and/or human activities can assist in better understanding of such movements, identify its nature, and highlight the areas of high strain for the security of human, public facilities, and vital national constructions.

Due to the lack of geodetic data collected from Egypt, former estimates are rough at best. Using very few GPS stations in Egypt, previous studies indicate northward motion of northern Nubia with respect to Eurasia of about 5 mm=y r ((McClusky et al., 2000); (Reilinger et al., 2006); (Mahmoud et al., 2005)). In order to better constrain the movement rate of northern Nubia and the interaction between Nubian, Eurasian, and Arabian plates, 16 permanent GPS stations in combination with 47 non-permanent stations covering Egypt for the period 2006-2012 were used. The collected data for about seven years were processed using Bernese 5.2 GNSS Software (Dach et al., 2007). To establish a good configuration around the Egyptian stations, the processing is carried out including 86 permanent stations belonging to three different tectonic plates. This led to a considerably better coverage of the Sinai-Dead Sea region as it represents the border between the Nubian and Arabian plates. Also, 34 stations out of these 86 are included in the ITRF2008 and used for datum definition. The Bernese results are assessed using the time series analysis tool CATS (Williams, 2008).

The estimated absolute horizontal velocity field for Egypt is about 28-30 mm/yr to the northeast direction. GPS sites show a relative motion between Nubia and Eurasia of about 6.5±1 mm/yr, which increases towards the Hellenic trench, 8.2±0.8 mm/yr in Sinai peninsula, 14.2±1.4 mm/yr in the North of the Arabian plate and 22.3±�0.7 mm/yr in eastern and central Turkey. In the Nubia fixed frame the Gulf of Suez and southern Sinai do not show any significant horizontal velocities, which implies that Sinai may be still connected to Nubia. Applying the dislocation fault parallel analysis, the slip rate and the locking depth of the Dead Sea Transform (DST) fault are 5