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Project description
The Barents Sea is an economically and societally important sedimentary basin in the northern part of the Norwegian Continental Shelf. The area displays a complex tectono-sedimentary evolution associated with Triassic rifting, high sediment supply in Mesozoic and deformation of a highly mobile salt layer, producing a suite of geometrically complex structures, such as salt diapirs and pillows. The growth of these salt structures controlled the depositional fairways and stratigraphy of Triassic-Eocene post-salt sediments through the formation of minibasins, rollovers and turtle-back structures in the basin. However, the kinematics, timing, and style of salt deformation have varied significantly through time and space in the basin, with many sectors having different styles of rift structure and salt deformation and evolution. This project builds on ongoing projects investigating salt deformation in the Nordkapp Basin to investigate salt tectonics in the Southern sector of the Barents Sea.

Understanding the three-dimensional variability of these salt structures is crucial to constrain the evolution and tectono-stratigraphic architecture of their associated minibasins and sediments fairways. This, in turn, is key to estimating the distribution and geometry of reservoirs for both hydrocarbons and CO2 storage, which leads to the following objectives for these projects:

• To integrate borehole-data with 2D and 3D reflection seismic data interpretation (time-migrated) to map base-salt, top-salt and key post-salt tectono-stratigraphy intervals across key areas in the Barents Sea.
• To produce structure and thickness maps to constrain the 3D variability of salt-controlled depocentres (i.e., minibasins and rollovers) that will be used to understand salt deformation kinematics and its control on sediment depositional patterns.
• To characterize and contrast the different salt-related structural styles and timing of deformation across the studyarea to understand the various controls of salt tectonics in the area.
• To create a conceptual evolution diagram (2D and/or 3D) for a key area of the basin.

Proposed course plan during the master's degree (60 ECTS)
GEOV261 / Basin analysis and subsurface interpretation -10
GEOV251 / Advanced Structural Geology - 10
GEOV272 / Seismic Interpretation – 10
GEOV364 / Advanced basin analysis – 5
GEOV361 / Sequence Stratigraphy and Source-to-Sink - 10
GEOV362 or 352 / Integrated tectonics and sedimentology field course / Field course in reservoir geology – 5
GEOV302 / Data analysis in earth science – 10

Field-, lab- and analysis work
Seismic lab work