Title: The Basement Fault Block Pattern: Its Importance in Petroleum Exploration, and Its Delineation with Residual Aeromagnetic Techniques
Abstract: Multiple episodes of tectonism, evidently related to plate tectonic movement during ≈ 4 billion years of Precambrian time, created complex patterns of basement shearing and faulting in the earth’s crystalline crust. The fracture patterns thus created are observable on space imagery of outcropping shield areas on all the continents, and would necessarily exist as well under all sedimentary basins deposited on the basement complex of the cratons. Such cratonic basins include the majority of the oil and gas producing sedimentary basins of the world. Subsequent movements of the basement faults and of the rigid to semi-rigid blocks between them occurred periodically during, and subsequent to, deposition of the sedimentary rocks and localized most of the structure and much of the stratigraphy in the sedimentary section. This basement fault block pattern also controls, to large degree, the topography of the basement, which in turn controls additional structure and stratigraphy through the mechanism of gravitational compaction. This paper documents a number of one-on-one correlations of the basement fault block pattern, as mapped by modern aeromagnetic techniques, with structural and stratigraphic features in the sedimentary section that are important to petroleum exploration. Several pitfalls in aeromagnetic interpretation that have been detrimental to the use of aeromagnetics in petroleum exploration in the past are shown to be due to the failure to recognize the existence of the basement fault block pattern and its control on the lithology of basement. It is these basement lithologic changes, and the resulting magnetic susceptibility changes, from block to block that allow us to map the basement fault block pattern and to use this information in important new ways for finding oil and gas.
Publication Year: 1995
Publication Date: 1995-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 3
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot