User:Tandru7/sandbox/Northern North Sea basin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The North Sea is part of the Atlantic Ocean in northern Europe. It is located between Norway and Denmark in the east, Scotland and England in the west, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France in the south.
The geology of the North Sea describes the geological features such as channels, trenches, basins and ridges today and the geological history, plate tectonics, geological events that created them.
Exploration in the North Sea was initiated in May of 1964 when the first well was spudded and the area has now become one of the most prolific hydrocarbon provinces in the world.[1] Total recoverable reserves found to date, including adjacent land areas, amount to over 100 billion barrels of oil and natural gas.[2]
Geologically speaking, the North Sea is divided into four main basins: Northern, Moray Firth, Central, and Southern. Each has a long and complex geologic history with unique structural and stratigraphic developments driven by tectonic events over the last 400 Million years.[1] The northern North Sea Paleorift system, including the Viking and Sogn graben, is an approximately 150-200 km wide zone of extended upper crust with preserved strata from pre-Triassic to Tertiary. It is bounded by the Shetland Platform to the west and the Norwegian mainland to the east.[3]