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Petroleum Geoscience

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Stratigraphic modelling of turbidite prospects to reduce exploration risk

¹ Department of Geology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK(d.waltham{at}gl.rhul.ac.uk)
² Midland Valley Exploration Ltd, 144 West George Street, Glasgow G2 2HG, UK
³ Present address: Shell International Exploration and Production B.V., Kessler Park 1, 2288 GS Rijswijk,The Netherlands

This article presents an integrated workflow to model the evolution of ancient turbidity currents on a 3D structurally reconstructed palaeo-seafloor, allowing ancient turbidite sediment distributions to be estimated. Effective use of such approaches requires efficient model-inversion procedures so that model parameters (e.g. flow dimensions, densities etc.) can be estimated from any available data. It is shown that a directed Monte Carlo approach (i.e. a simple genetic search algorithm) is very effective. A case study of a Mesozoic prospect in the UK North Sea shows the power of these methods to discriminate between potentially attractive sediment-source locations. The main power of this approach lies in its ability to exclude many, otherwise attractive, sedimentation scenarios.

KEYWORDS: turbidity currents, forward modelling, inverse modelling, 3D reconstruction

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