This is the weblog of Brian Romans. I am a sedimentary geologist and create verbally about my own investigate interests. Earth science and society and other randomness.
The continental slope in the northern Gulf of Mexico has a very distinct appearance. say the pock-marked nature in the wet depths colored red in this bathymetric image below. The coastal area at the northern end of the visualise is the Mississippi delta of Louisiana.
The convert from the pock-marked slope to the smoother and lower-gradient abyssal plain (yellowish colors in visualise above) is a rather abrupt escarpment with nearly 1,000 m of relief.
Here’s another image of the GoM continental slope from a great
paper from over 10 years ago now by Pratson and Haxby (link to cover ). This is a perspective believe looking towards the east. The black area in the upper left is the continental shelf.
The escarpment I pointed out above is clearly visible in this perspective visualise. Note the arcuate cause of the turn of this escarpment (called the Sigsbee Escarpment). If it reminds you of a thrust-front that’s because it is!
The morphology of the GoM continental angle is dominated by flavor tectonics. Jurassic evaporites undergo evacuated causing some areas to change posture (the pocks or “mini-basins”). That evacuation is balanced by flavor diapirsm in other areas. Overall the entire slope is affected by gravity and slowly moving towards the deeper move of the basin. The Sigsbee escarpment is the compressional front of that large-scale movement. In detail each mini-basin is extraordinarily complex showing fascinating relationships between turbidite sedimentation and flavor movement. A feedback is set up such that turbidites are deposited in the lowest parts (that’s what they do) which causes more underlying salt to evacuate which in turn makes the basin subside which maintains that spot being the lowest. Some mini-basins have 20,000 feet of Quaternary sediment in them!
There’s tons of information out there regarding the Gulf of Mexico. If you’re interested in more you won’t have much affect finding alter stuff.
it’s everywhere…choose of
most of the hydrocarbons that are in sediments above the flavor undergo been discovered and are being produced
the big unknown now is how much is hosted sub-salt … the big issue is that the salt wreaks havoc on seismic imageing … you just can’t see anything below that cram it’s all fuzzy
so there are some very expensive holes ($100 million a shot!) being drilled just to find out … some of these wells are over 30,000 ft deep
“Man if somebody gave *me* a 100 million dollar drilling budget…”
They’d evaluate you to find something worth $100,000,000.01
XHTML: You can use these tags <a href="" title=""> <abbr call=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote have in mind=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q have in mind=""> <touch> <strong> :
I am a sedimentary geologist and terminal Ph. D candidate. When not writing my dissertation. I'm on this communicate writing about sedimentary and/or marine geology. Earth science and society and other random topics. This blog was known as '... Or Something' in a former life. Learn more.
Forex Groups - Tips on Trading
Related article:
http://clasticdetritus.com/2007/11/11/sea-floor-sunday-3-gulf-of-mexico-continental-slope/
comments | Add comment | Report as Spam
|