LE3 .A278 2023

2023

Snyder, Mo

Acadia University

Bachelor of Science

Honours

Earth and Environmental Science

Earth & Environmental Sciences

The Scotian Basin is a rifted continental margin that began forming in the late Triassic during the breakup of Pangea when the North American plate and the African plate began to separate. Rifting created a series of depocenters and platforms, and those depocenters (i.e., basins, grabens) were filled with sediment. The first formation deposited was dominantly shale, siltstone, and sandstone of the Eurydice Formation. Overlying and interfingering the Eurydice Formation is the halite and minor anhydrite bearing Argo Formation. These two formations represent an underexplored and classically ignored section of the Scotian Basin. The goal of this project is to produce a 3-D model of basin geometry and connectivity between two depocenters within the Scotian Basin, the Mohican Graben and the Naskapi Graben. Data used for this project include 2-D seismic and well log data. The horizons interpreted were the pre-rift Paleozoic top of basement, the top of Eurydice and Argo Formations, and the top Scatarie Member of the Abenaki Formation. In total, 26 seismic lines and wells were used to construct the 3-D model. The Mohican Graben represents a shallowly dipping graben that terminates to the northwest into the Naskapi Ridge, which is then steeply faulted forming the Naskapi Graben to the northwest. Irregular stratigraphic contacts in the Mohican Graben suggest that the Eurydice and Argo Formations were initially deposited as alluvial fan deposits sourced from two large fluvial systems, or the synrift deposits were deposited across a uniform margin later separated by large sinistral transfer faults, suggesting little to no fault reactivation in the area post-deposition. By gaining an understanding of the initial inception of the Scotian Basin and building a 3-D model, we are providing a valuable resource to the petroleum industry and future academic users.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:4000