Platform margin and deep water carbonates

Abstract

The increased need to find new energy resources in deep marine frontier environments has clearly intensified the importance and interest in deep water carbonate settings and how these settings interrelate to adjacent shoal water platform margins. Coarse-grained mass-flow deposits beyond the shelf break in terrigenous clastic environments have been known for many years to form major petroleum reservoirs, and it is likely that similar deep-water clastic facies will continue to be future exploration targets. The purpose of this short course is to improve approaches and ideas related to petroleum and mineral exploration in platform margin and deeper water carbonate environments. Emphasis is placed on understanding depositional environments, their contained facies and diagenetic patterns. Better geologic interpretation of these three elements in carbonate sedimentology and facies analysis is usually critical in petroleum exploration. These elements are also receiving wider importance in base metal exploration as many mineral deposits in carbonates are controlled by primary depositional patterns and not simply due to tectonics and/or proximity to igneous intrustions.