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Abstract

AAPG Bulletin, V. 84, No. 1 (January 2000), P. 45-64.

The Role of Fault Interaction and Linkage in Controlling Synrift Stratigraphic Sequences: Late Jurassic, Statfjord East Area, Northern North Sea1

Nancye H. Dawers and John R. Underhill2

©Copyright 2000. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists. All rights reserved.

1Manuscript received August 3, 1998; revised manuscript received April 22, 1999; final acceptance June 30, 1999.
2Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Edinburgh, Grant Institute, The King's Buildings, West Mains Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JW, Scotland, United Kingdom; e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

This work was funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), under the Realising Our Potential Award (ROPA) scheme (no. GR3/R9521), and Norsk Hydro Research Centre. Seismic interpretation was undertaken using Schlumberger™ GeoQuest IESX software at facilities in Edinburgh supported by the Centre for Marine and Petroleum Technology, Norsk Hydro, Shell Expro, and Esso (UK) Ltd. We thank Gunn Mangerud and PŒl Skott for their support and efforts in releasing data; Randi Jordan and Rolf Helland for help with well data; and Anker Berge, Kjell-Owe HŠger, Cai Puigdefˆbregas, Arvid N¿ttvedt, Tom Dreyer, Roald Færseth, Anne Otelie Eide, Gunn Mangerud, PŒl Skott, Sarah Prosser, Paul Milner, Patience Cowie, Sarah Davies, Sanjeev Gupta, Aileen McLeod, and Jon Turner for discussions. Bulletin reviewers Bruce Trudgill, Manuel Willemse, and Al Lacazette provided very helpful reviews; Juan Contreras, Patience Cowie, and Simon Kattenhorn provided additional helpful comments. Gerard White assisted with figures and Chung-Lun Lau provided computer support.

ABSTRACT

Examination of well-constrained three-dimensional seismic data demonstrates the role of fault interaction and linkage in controlling the nature of synrift sequences on the hanging wall of the Statfjord East fault, a typical Late Jurassic structure in the northern North Sea Brent province. Al though now a single fault, the Statfjord East fault originally consisted of several en echelon segments, each of which defined individual subbasins. Structural and stratigraphic evidence, both along and across fault strike, indicates that the fault resulted from segment propagation, interaction, and linkage. Facies architecture, thickness variations, and the internal character of synrift formations are temporally and spatially related to the subbasin geometry. Variations in displacement along the fault segments exhibit characteristics of interacting en echelon faults, including anomalous displacement gradients in regions of segment overlap. We attribute the observed shifts in depocenters to local enhancement of displacement rates, resulting from the interaction of neighboring fault segments. The results have far-reaching consequences for synrift plays in the northern North Sea because they imply that only from the perspective of fault growth and linkage can the Late Jurassic structure and stratigraphy be fully understood.

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