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Cratonic basement structures and their influence on the development of sedimentary basins in western Canada

Lyatsky Geoscience Research and Consulting Ltd., Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Corresponding author: lyatskyh@cadvision.com

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

It has been known for decades that the distribution of oil, gas, and coal deposits in the Alberta and Williston basins is, in a regional and/or local sense, linear (Figure 1). Highangle faults from the crystalline basement, not always detectable with seismic data, are commonly recognized to be a reason for this linearity. But because the ways in which basement faults control the structure and lithofacies in the platformal sedimentary cover are often unclear, the obvious predictive power of this relationship has been underutilized.

View larger version (102K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 1. Distribution of oil and gas exploration wells in central Alberta. T = township; R = range. Linear alignments of wells represent alignments of exploration targets, as hydrocarbon reservoirs at different levels in the sedimentary cover commonly concentrate along steep, straight faults.

The sediment-covered platforms in the North American craton in western Canada and the barren Canadian Shield contain two fundamentally different types of crystalline-crust structures that were formed at different times: (1) Archean and Early Proterozoic (Hudsonian and earlier) ductile orogenic structures; and (2) Middle Proterozoic to Recent cratonic structures. The latter are usually brittle, steep, easily reactivated block-bounding faults forming the main northeast-southwest/northwest-southeast and north-south/east-west orthogonal pairs. These brittle faults were created as the cooling crust began to crack at the end of the ancient orogenesis. They were rejuvenated, and additional faults appeared, in the fluctuating regional and local stress field during the craton's subsequent evolution. These high-angle faults bound crustal blocks, whose movements affected the development of sedimentary basins in the Phanerozoic cover.

Brittle cratonic . . . [Full Text of this Article]

This article has been cited by other articles:

				S. P. Gay Jr. Basement reactivation in the Alberta Basin: Observational constraints and mechanical rationale Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology, September 1, 2001; 49(3): 426 - 428. [Full Text] [PDF]