Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Queen Charlotte Basin
Summary
The Queen Charlotte Basin is a structural basin mostly beneath the continental shelf offshore, between Haida Gwaii, Vancouver Island, and the British Columbia mainland, roughly coincident with the physiographic region named the Hecate Depression.
The term Queen Charlotte Basin normally refers to the Cenozoic rocks, but these are underlain by what seems to be a thick Mesozoic succession. The Queen Charlotte Basin was formed by periods of extension, including thinning and volcanism during the mid-Cenozoic era. The large Cenozoic plutons that magnetic data suggest exist in the southeastern part of the Queen Charlotte Basin seem to be related to the Anahim hotspot.
Renewed interest in western Canadian shelf basins results from widespread expectations that the long-standing government moratorium on offshore exploration there may soon be lifted. The best oil prospects seem to exist in Cretaceous reservoirs in the southwestern part of the Queen Charlotte Basin, in western Queen Charlotte Sound.
With widespread oil seeps from rocks of all ages, two dozen wells were drilled in the Queen Charlotte and Tofino areas before the 1970s; many land areas were mapped in the 1980s and 1990s. However, Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii mostly lack caprock. Hecate Strait seems to lack adequate source and reservoir rocks, and the offshore wells did not significantly test the Mesozoic horizons. Rocks on the mainland are crystalline. The Tofino, Winona, Georgia and Juan de Fuca basin lack significant known source rocks. By contrast, southwestern Queen Charlotte Basin seems to contain a stack of source, reservoir and caprock strata, largely at oil-window burial depths, as well as large block-fault trap structures.
While some workers (e.g., Lyatsky and Haggart, 1993; Lyatsky, 2006) regard the Mesozoic horizons to be the primary oil-exploration targets, others (e.g., Dietrich, 1995; Hannigan et al., 2001) focus more on the overlying Cenozoic rocks. Rohr and Dietrich (1992) considered the Queen Charlotte Basin to have formed largely by strike-slip movements in the Cenozoic.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.