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AAPG Bulletin

Abstract


Volume: 60 (1976)

Issue: 9. (September)

First Page: 1463

Last Page: 1501

Title: Plate Tectonics in Oil and Gas Exploration of Continental Margins

Author(s): Thomas L. Thompson (2)

Abstract:

The hypothesis of multiple crustal plates floating on viscous material, called asthenosphere, provides reason for viewing the earth's outer shell or lithosphere as a dynamic system of shifting continents and changing ocean basins that has shaped world geography during the past 200 m.y. concurrent with the accumulation of roughly 90 percent of the known reserves of oil and gas. Plate tectonics offers a powerful approach to exploring the continental margins (extending offshore to water depths of 15,000 ft or 4,600 m) which reasonably could contain more oil and gas than the land. Relative movements among crustal plates suggest classification of continental margins (as divergent, convergent, and transform), and discussion of their origin in the context of structural style, te perature history, gross stratigraphy (including source, reservoir, and trap potential), and particularly the time and place relation of these factors necessary for oil and gas accumulation.

The formation of divergent, Atlantic-type, margins by extension tectonics (including continental rifting, crustal subsidence, and seaward tilting) reasonably encourages exploration because high earth temperatures favorable for generation and expulsion of oil and gas prevail at the same time and place as shallow-water sedimentation (that favors the formation of sources, reservoirs, and traps). Clues to possible oil and gas provinces buried within or beneath thick carbonate platforms or thick land-derived sediment include: fossil rifts or pull-apart basins, peninsula and island split-offs, remnants of tear faults or transverse grabens (aulacogens), reefs, salt or slump-related features, volcanic rocks, and onlap unconformities with stratigraphic pinchouts.

Convergent, Pacific-type margins invite exploration in Cenozoic sediments deposited during the formation of several basin types that favor oil and gas generation, expulsion, and accumulation for varied combinations of reasons. These include rapid, deep burial and subsequent uplift by thrust faulting adjacent to oceanic trenches, and high earth temperatures associated with extension faulting in marginal seas of Asian-Pacific margins.

Continental collision, representing the final stage of plate convergence, results in extreme contrasts of topography, sedimentation, structure, and oil potential and in realization that understanding the continental margins of the present helps in the understanding of ancient continental margins that now form parts of the land, including most of the known reserves of oil and gas.

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