Introduction to March Focus: Atlantic Region

The Canadian East Coast, featuring the interplay between heatflow, stretching, faulting, and synrift sedimentation, is the focus of our March issue. We have received five major contributions: two from academia and three from industry. The papers from academia are from Dr. Mladen R. Nedimović at the Department of Earth Sciences, Dalhousie University, and Dr. J. Kim Welford et. al at the Department of Earth Sciences, Memorial University. The industry contributions are from Deric E.L Cameron et. al at Nalcor Energy, Sam Green and Alexander Edwards from Ikon Sciences and Nick Huntbatch et. al from Ikon Sciences.

Dr. Mladen R. Nedimović, in his contribution titled “Ocean Bottom Seismometer Instrumentation in Canada”, talks about the history of Ocean Bottom Seismometer (OBS) globally and how it developed in Canada locally. This is followed by an introduction to the National Facility for Seismic Imaging (NFSI) and the future research utilizing the NSFI capabilities. As Mladen explains, the history of OBS development in Canada started in 1975 at the Atlantic Geoscience Centre at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a purchase of two instruments. A pool of 20 OBSs were operated through Dalhousie university (Dal), and Geological Survey of Canada (GSC)- Atlantic collaboration until 2015 when they were decommissioned due to advanced age. The Dal/ GSC OBS represented the only such capability in Canada. The NSFI, housed at Dalhousie university, is funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and six provincial matching funds agencies and it brings together a team of seismologists from ten major Canadian universities. The NSFI is expected to become a leading world-class facility and it consists of a pool of 120 broadband OBSs. This facility will enable Canadian seismologists to image, illuminate, and monitor critically important structures in the Earth and it should position Canadian scientists at the forefront of future discoveries.

The paper from Dr. J. Kim Welford titled “Atlantic Rifted Margin Studies from the Edge: Geophysical Research at Memorial University” is a brief history of geophysical East Coast Margin research and current geophysical research conducted on the East Coast by Memorial University. The contribution of the LITHOPROBE studies in our current understating of the tectonic framework of the Appalachian Orogen, the Study of Continental Rifting and Extension on the Eastern Canadian Shelf (SCREECH) project, and the industrial partnership leading to the creation of the NSERC Chevron Industrial Research Chair in Reservoir Characterization are some of the highlights of her contribution. She continues the paper by talking briefly on how a combination of seismic reflection, seismic refraction, and potential field data used by the Memorial Applied Geophysics for Rift Tectonics (MAGRiT) group has improved our understanding of rifted continental margins.

The first paper from industry, by Deric Cameron, is titled “Exploration Initiatives, Offshore Regions, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada”. The focus of this paper is on Newfoundland and Labrador’s offshore sedimentary basins, and it shows how newly acquired seismic data has led the exploration team at Nalcor Energy to revisit the regional basin configuration in the Orphan/Flemish Basins, to define three new sedimentary basins (Chidley, Holton, and Henley basins), and to refine the mapping on a fourth basin (Hawke Basin). The sheer volume of seismic data, 170,000 km 2D and 22,000 km² 3D, collected in this area is remarkable.

The second paper is from Ikon Sciences, by Nick Huntbatch et. al, and it is titled “ Frontier Exploration: Considerations When Developing a Predictive Rock Physics Framework”. In this contribution, the importance of building an integrated frame work for rock physics studies for exploration in frontier basins are discuses. The key components of building this framework are discussed based on a study from the Canadian Atlantic margin.

The last paper, by Sam Green and Alexander Edwards from Ikon Sciences, is titled “Building a Geological-Pressure Model Incorporating Global Analogues”. In their contribution, Sam and Alexanders talk about the very important topic of pore pressure prediction in deep water settings of frontier basins by providing examples from Atlantic Margin. They show that building a geological framework based on seismic data comes first followed by understanding the sand-shale inter-relationships. At this stage, global analogues become important by providing end-member scenarios. The third step is integrating temperature and age with log response and finally building a pressure model that is process driven.