Master Project Example - Salt Tectonics in the Southern North Sea: the interplay between basement-involved rifting, intra-salt heterogeneity and salt flow

The North Sea is an economically and societally important sedimentary basin in the Norwegian Continental Shelf. The area exhibits a complex tectono-sedimentary evolution associated with a protracted history of deformation, related to multiple phases of thick-skinned extension through Permian to middle-late Jurassic times, salt deposition and long-lived salt tectonics. This has produced a suite of geometrically complex structures, such as different types of diapirs, faults and extensional and contractional salt structures. The growth of these salt structures controlled the depositional fairways and stratigraphy of Triassic-Jurassic to Cenozoic post-salt sediments through the formation of minibasins, rollovers and turtle-back structures. The kinematics, timing and style of salt deformation have, however, varied significantly across different sectors in the North Sea.

Project description

Previous studies have demonstrated that the interplay between variable salt thickness and post-salt rift-related extension and sedimentation has been a primary controlled basin evolution and kinematics (Duffy et al., 2012; Jackson et al, 2015; Ge et al., 2016). These studies have not addressed the role of heterogeneity and laterally variable units within the salt sequence, which have recently been recognized in numerical modelling studies as an important control on salt flow (Pichel et al., 2025). Understanding the three-dimensional variability of intra-salt heterogeneity and its distribution within different salt structures is crucial to constrain the evolution and architecture of salt diapirs and their associated minibasins. This, in turn, is key to estimating the potential of using salt for energy storage as well as the distribution and geometry of reservoirs for hydrocarbons and CO2 storage. This leads to the following objectives for two MSc projects targeting 2 different sectors of the North Sea (Norwegian-Danish Basin and Dutch Sector)

  • To integrate borehole data with 2D and 3D reflection seismic data interpretation (time-migrated) to map base-salt, top-salt and key post-salt tectono-stratigraphy intervals across key areas in the North Sea.
  • To produce structure and thickness maps to constrain the 3D variability of salt-controlled depocentres (i.e., minibasins and rollovers) that will be used to understand salt deformation kinematics and its control on sediment depositional patterns.
  • To characterize and contrast the different salt-related structural styles and timing of deformation across the study area to understand the different controls, in particular the role of intra-salt heterogeneity on salt tectonics in the area.
  • To perform a 2D restoration and conceptual evolution diagram for a key area of the basin.

Proposed course plan during the master's degree (60 ECTS)
GEOV261 / Basin analysis and subsurface interpretation -10
GEOV251 / Advanced Structural Geology - 10
GEOV272 / Seismic Interpretation – 10
GEOV364 / Advanced basin analysis – 5
GEOV300 / Scientific writing and communication in Earth Science - 5
GEOV361 / Sequence Stratigraphy and Source-to-Sink - 10
GEOV302 / Data analysis in earth science – 10

Supervisors

Leonardo Pichel (main supervisor)

Rob Gawthorpe, UiB-GEO

Mar Morgagas, GEO3BCN-CSIC

Last updated: 12.12.2025