Norwegian-Greenland Sea thermal field

Abstract

Abstract Thermal gradient and thermal conductivity measurements carried out in the Norwegian-Greenland Sea and in the western Eurasia Basin from 1967 to 1996 have yielded 436 heat-flow values which have been stored on a UNIX-platform database, heat , to facilitate retrieval, documentation and display. heat contains all public domain data for the region, and the database and application programs are freely available. The heat flow on oceanic crust reveals a clear, first-order heat-flow-crustal-age relationship. The thermal conductivity is relatively uniform and consistent, with values in the 0.85–1.15 W m −1 K −1 range. The lower values are from the ocean basins and the higher values from the continental margins. Local, very high heat flow along the present spreading axis may imply active volcanism or venting. We also document local continental slope maxima on the Møre and western Barents Sea margins, contrasting greatly with the typical low heat flow, generally <75 m W m −2 , on old oceanic and thinned continental crust. The abnormally high heat flow, exceeding 1000 m W m −2 , on the ‘Håkon Mosby’ gas-seeping mud volcano on the Barents Sea margin suggests that also other local slope maxima may be related to active seeps.