--> Abstract: Geologic Framework and Related Hydrocarbon Potential of Beaufort and Northern Chukchi Seas, by Arthur Grantz, Stephen L. Eittreim; #90966 (1977).

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Abstract: Geologic Framework and Related Hydrocarbon Potential of Beaufort and Northern Chukchi Seas

Arthur Grantz, Stephen L. Eittreim

The continental shelf in the Beaufort and northern Chukchi Seas is underlain by a complex of sedimentary basins that have considerable petroleum potential. These basins are bounded on the south by the thrust-faulted Brooks Range orogene in northern Alaska and by the partly analogous Herald arch and fault zone in the central Chukchi Sea. On the north they face the deep Canada basin of the Arctic Ocean at a continental margin of Atlantic type that for much of its length contains a shelf-edge basement high.

Beneath Alaska's North Slope and the adjacent northeast Chukchi and southern and Beaufort continental shelves is a compound sedimentary basin in which are Prudhoe Bay and other oil fields. The basin contains clastic and carbonate rocks of Late Devonian to Early Cretaceous age deposited on a stable shelf, the Arctic platform, and flysch and molasse of Cretaceous age deposited in a foredeep, the Colville geosyncline. The Jago basin contains similar platform and foredeep rocks beneath the easternmost North Slope and adjacent area offshore south of 70°N lat.

The northern margin of the Arctic platform is a broad and complex rift zone that now is buried under the continental shelf. The rift zone formed in Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous time and appears to be related to crustal movements that produced the oceanic Canada basin. Cretaceous and Tertiary shelf, slope, and deltaic clastic rocks derived from highlands on the south overfilled the Colville geosyncline and prograded northward across the rifted northern margin of the Arctic platform to form the sedimentary prisms of the North Chukchi and Camden basins and the intervening Western Beaufort outer shelf province. Many tectonically similar basins elsewhere in the world are richly petroliferous, but the presence of the constantly drifting polar ice pack over these basins for all but, at best, a few weeks a year is a formidable obstacle to exploration and development.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90966©1977 Alaska Geological Society 1977 Symposium, Anchorage, Alaska