The northern Barents Sea is divided into two principal prospective provinces: (1) the platform areas south and east of Svalbard contain possible hydrocarbon plays in Upper Palaeozoic clastics and carbonates, and in Mesozoic sandstones; (2) The Barents Sea margin, which includes the Yermak Plateau, with possible plays in late Mesozoic and Tertiary sandstones. The platform areas are underlain by a Palaeozoic rift system of highs and intervening basins, containing Devonian and Early Carboniferous rocks overlain by relatively flat-lying sequences of Late Palaeozoic and Mesozoic age. The Barents Sea margin is a complex basin province formed in response to phases of the Late Mesozoic and Cenozoic break-up of the Pangea supercontinent, and subsequent seafloor spreading west of Spitsbergen.The northern Barents Sea is as yet not open for commercial exploration, and no deep wells have been drilled in the offshore areas. It is one of the largest remaining frontier areas in western Europe and as such affords a wide range of exploration opportunities. However, the area is considered to be of high risk for petroleum exploration, with generally low statistical probabilities of discovery, largely because of the limited amount of data available to evaluate potential hydrocarbon plays, and in particular the presence, distribution, quality and maturity of source rocks. Hydrocarbon resource estimates are therefore characterized by large uncertainties.Potential reservoir rocks are identified, and seismic mapping has revealed many structural and stratigraphic leads on the Sentralbanken High, the Kong Karls Land Platform, the Gardarbanken High and in the Mesozoic and Tertiary sub-basins northwest of Bjørnøya. Future challenges will be focused on reducing uncertainties in mapping the distribution of source rocks of suitable quality. Limited basin modelling studies indicate that oil may have been generated and accumulated in many provinces, but better constrained models are required to evaluate Early Cretaceous thermal events and Late Cenozoic uplift processes that may have had negative effects on both oil generation and the retention of hydrocarbons in traps.

No abstract

The seismic imaging of salt diapirs in the Nordkapp Basin gave rise to considerable problems in defining their shape and volume. Independent information was added by integrating the interpretation with high resolution gravity and magnetic data. We developed a novel, iterative workflow, separated into sub‐categories: sediments, salt structures, basement and Moho. Distinctions between the sources of the anomalies from different depths was achieved by utilizing the different decay characteristics of gravity, gravity gradiometry and high resolution magnetic anomalies. The workflow was applied to the southern part of the Nordkapp Basin. It started with the sedimentary model derived from seismics, populated with measured densities and magnetic susceptibilities and a starting model for the base salt. The residual after the removal of this model was interpreted in terms of a crustal model, including flexural isostatic calculations for the Moho with the sedimentary load. The residual after the removal of crustal and early sedimentary model was used to tune the salt model. As these major and minor modelling steps depend on each other, an iterative process was applied to stepwise improve the density and magnetic susceptibility model. The first vertical gradient of gravity and the magnetic field were found to give most information about the cap rock of the diapirs. The improvement in salt imaging, integrated with results from controlled‐source electromagnetic and magneto‐telluric modelling is shown for the salt diapir Uranus, where a well, terminated in the salt, constrains the minimum of the depth to base salt.

No abstract

No abstract