The northern Red Sea is underlain by a series of Plio-Pleistocene sedimentary sequences that unconformably overlie evaporitic series of late Miocene age. A series of bathyal rifts and cogenetic diapirs, trending approximately N-S, were recently discovered in that region between latitude 26¿30'B and 28¿N. The rifts are up to 60 km long and 7 km wide, and the diapirs commonly ascended along the rifts' boundary faults. The diapirs stem from the late Miocene evaporites; thus the discerned structural trends were developed during the Plio-Pleistocene. The encountered structural patterns deviate considerably from the NW-SE structural trends that prevail in the central Red Sea as well as in the faults that border the northern Red Sea and the Gulf of Suez. The tectonic activity that formed the Suez rift in the middle to late Miocene was not rejuvenated there during the Plio-Pleistocene, and the new data indicate that the axis of the tectonic extension at the northern Red Sea jumped to show a northward orientation. It is suggested that incipient spreading center extends from the Red Sea northward to the Gulf of Elat and the Dead Sea rift.