Sedimentary Response to the Evolution of Mobile Substrates on Continental Margins

Supervisors: Rob Gawthorpe, Mads Huuse (UoM) & Frode Hadler-Jacobsen (Statoil)

The temporal and spatial evolution of salt-cored fault and fold arrays generates complex dip- and strike-variability through the depositional history of passive margins. Deformation of the mobile substratum creates a continually evolving slope topography that exerts strong control on gravity flows, and thus, submarine slope channel routing, geometry and architecture.

Spectral decomposition, multi-attribute blending and iso-proportional slicing techniques are applied to high resolution 3D seismic volumes from Offshore West Africa to identify and image discrete depositional elements within the Oligo-Miocene interval. By combining detailed analysis of the structural evolution of individual salt diapirs using thickness map analysis with attribute-based deepwater submarine channel geomorphology we show the structurally-related variations in channel morphometrics, architecture and geomorphology.