CHAPTER 2

SEDIMENTARY BASINS

Sedimentary Basins
Sedimentary basin: a low area of the earths
surface underlain by a thick sequence of
sedimentary rocks.
Basin Types:
1. Extensional basins (divergent plate motion)
Two main mechanisms operate to create
extensional basins. First, rifting can occur when
a thermal plume or sheet impinges on the base
of the lithosphere (active rifting).

Sedimentary Basins
Rift basins:
Form as a direct result of crustal tension at the
zones of seafloor spreading.
A rift basin is bounded by a major fault systems
(grabens).
A number of rift basins; including Baikal rift,
Red Sea, North Sea, and Central Africa rift
valleys extending from Nigeria, Mozambique,
and Somalia.

 The lithosphere
heats up,
weakens, and can
rift. An example is
the East African
Rift.

Sedimentary Basins
The second mechanism (passive rifting) is
continental stretching and thinning, which has
happened during all major continental
breakups.
The most widely recognized pair of passive
margins are South America and Africa.

Passive Rifting

Sedimentary Basins
Passive basins:

Sedimentary Basins
Intracratonic basins: sag.
Intracratonic (intracontinental) basins were
regarded as somewhat enigmatic. Their
alternative description, "sags," illustrates their
form. Most tend to be broadly oval, shallow,
saucer-shaped basins .
The total sediment infill package increases
from edge to center and major faults are
absence.

Sedimentary Basins
Intracratonic basins generally contain abundant
reservoir rocks in both terrigenous and
carbonate facies.
Source rocks tend to be poorly developed,
except in the more marine carbonate basins.
Because these basins occur on stable granitic
crust, heat flow rates are low and major oil
generation may not have oocurred.
Siries of Intracratonic basins occur in North
Africa, eg: Murzuq and Kufra basins
(terrigenous basins). Another example is the
Michigan basin (carbonate basin).

Intracratonic
basins
Murzuq
basin, Libya

Malay Basin

Sedimentary Basins
Epicratonic basins: basins that lie on the edge
of continental crust.
The Tertiary Gulf Coast of the US and the Niger
delta illustrate a terrigenous epicratonic basin,
and the Sirte embayment of Libya illustrates a
carbonate-filled basin.
Epicratonic basins show that they are more
prospective than intracratonic basins.

Sedimentary Basins
Heat flow is high, which favors hc generation in
areas of high geothermal gradients due to
overpressure.
Crustal instability also favors structural
entrapment of oil, as well as stratigraphic traps.

Epicratonic Basins

Sedimentary Basins
2. Basin generated during convergent plate
motion:
The style of basin development associated with
convergent plate motion is highly varied, and
depends upon the interplay of several factors.
These include the types of crust undergoing
convergence: continental to continental, oceanic
to oceanic, and oceanic to continental.

Sedimentary Basins
Arc Systems or Troughs:
Characterized by six major components.
i) An outer rise on the oceanic plate.
This occurs as an arch on the abyssal plain.
ii) A trench.
Commonly > 10km deep, the trench contains
pelagic deposits and fine-grain turbidites.
Not considered to be prospective for petroleum
exploration.

Sedimentary Basins
iii) A subduction complex.
Comprises stacked fragments of oceanic crust
and its pelagic cover.
iv) A fore-arc basin.
Lies between the subduction complex and the
volcanic arc.
Less productive hc provinces than do back-arc
basins.
v) The volcanic (magmatic) arc.
Magma is generated from the partial melting of
the overriding and possibly subducting plates.

Overriding plate at a subduction zone

Forearc Basin

Sedimentary Basins
6. The back-arc region.
Floored by either oceanic or continental
lithosphere. Back-arc basins floored by oceanic
lithosphere tend to have very high rates of
subsidence and high heat flows.
Foreland basins: Where the back-arc region
is floored by continental lithosphere.
The deposits are shallow marine shales,
carbonates and tidal shelf sands.
Combination of favorable reservoir rocks,
source rocks, and traps diversity, back-arc
basins are commonly major hc provinces.

Sedimentary Basins
The Central Sumatra Basin is well-described
example. Other examples are Persian Gulf,
Western Canada and South East Asia.
The importance of foreland basins as petroleum
provinces outranks that of other basins
generated by convergent plate motions.
The basins are typically several thousands of
kilometers long and parallel to the arc and thrust
belt.

Sedimentary Basins

Sedimentary Basins

A simplified map and cross-section of the Zagros orogenic belt (Iran).

NNE-SSW diagrammatic cross-section to suggest the plate-tectonic model of

South China Sea Basin for Early Cretaceous toMiddle Eocene convergent

Sedimentary Basins
3. Strike-slip basins:
Strike-slip or wrench basins occur where
sections of the crust move laterally with respect
to each other.
Although a wrench system taken as a whole can
be of similar size to a rift, passive margin, or
foreland complex, individual basins are much
smaller than the other types of basin described
before.

Sedimentary Basins

A strike-slip basin plan and crosssection,

showing typical megasequence
distributions for the syn-rift, post-rift, and
transpression stages of the basin.

Sedimentary Basins:
Malay basin