Driving Exploration towards the Continent Ocean Boundary: The Impact Of Late Cretaceous Provenance Studies In East Greenland and Mid Norway

Heavy mineral analysis of sandstones is recognised as a fundamental tool for understanding sediment transport paths in basins and thereby providing important constraints on net:gross trends. Demonstration of the importance of this tool is provided by a study that investigated provenance trends in the Late Cretaceous of the Norwegian Greenland Sea region to predict the location of sandstone reservoirs. The study used sandstone samples from outcrops in East Greenland and from wells in the Vøring and Møre basins.

The Vøring and Møre basins are filled with large thicknesses of Late Cretaceous strata. When this work was initiated in 2001 penetrations of the Late Cretaceous succession of the Vøring and Møre basins were largely restricted to wells along the eastern margins of the basins with just a handful of wells in the centre and the west of the basins. Analysis of sandstone samples from the basins revealed a selection of sand types that could be related to sources in Mid Norway along their eastern margins. However, a sand type was found in wells from the centre and west of the Vøring Basin that could not. Analysis of sandstones from Late Cretaceous exposures in East Greenland revealed that the sand type in the centre and west of the Vøring Basin was also present in East Greenland, part the conjugate margin to the Vøring and Møre basins. These results suggested that reservoirs composed of this sand type would thicken westwards. This lent confidence for further drilling in the west of the Vøring Basin, farther from the Norwegian coastline, towards the continent ocean boundary.

More recent work on samples from the region has only served to strengthen these relationships and indicates that large amounts of sediment entered the Vøring and Møre basins along their western margins. It has also become clear that these sediment sources were not within the confines of the Norway-Greenland rift but potentially from sources in the Arctic.