Rifts renaissance: stretching the crust and extending exploration frontiers

Abstract

In August of 2008, 200 Earth scientists gathered at the IMAX theatre at the Houston Museum of Natural History to discuss and debate the evolution of continental rifts and rifted continental margins. The audience was evenly split between industry and academic delegates. The meeting was organized as a joint Geological Society of London Petroleum Group and SEPM (Society for Sedimentary Geology) event. Over the course of three days we worked through six sessions covering Oceans to Margins and Basins to Barrels. The formal oral presentations of 43 technical papers were complimented by an ever changing poster display of newly acquired and processed deep seismic reflection data (Ion-GXT Global Spans Seismic Programmes). The conference sessions were organized into three major themes which reflected the challenges of applying plate scale concepts through basin margin models to the rich datasets and understanding at the scale of individual basins and plays. When the original ‘Return to Rifts’ conference was conceived back in 2004 the idea was to bring together industry and academic workers with an interest in rifts, their evolution, fill and hydrocarbon potential. There was a perception that 15 years of exploration in Cenozoic and Late Cretaceous passive margins, where high quality 3D seismic data had been both identifying and de-risking hydrocarbon plays with high success rates, had made us complacent and perhaps had led us to lose touch with the basic geology underpinning a working play that has historically delivered nearly 1/3 of the global hydrocarbon endowment. …