The amount of provenance information available for onshore and offshore sedimentary deposits in the North Atlantic Region is substantial and rapidly increasing. These data provide an improved understanding of reservoir geology (quality, diagenetic issues, regional source-to-sink relations and local stratigraphic correlations), and thereby can reduce hydrocarbon exploration risk.
As such, the number of proprietary, industry-related and public research provenance studies has increased considerably in recent years, and the development and use of new analytical techniques have also caused a surge in the number of grains, isotopes and chemical elements analysed in each study.
As a result, it is today close to impossible for the individual researcher or petroleum geologist to draw on all existing provenance data. And the vast expansion of data availability demands new and better methods to analyse and visualise large amounts of data in a systematic way.
To this end, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) have established a web-based database of provenance data for the North Atlantic area: The North Atlantic Provenance Database.
Construction of the database was funded jointly by GEUS and NPD. Future maintenance and further development will be funded by the petroleum industry by subscription to the database. The steering committee is comprised of staff at GEUS, NPD and sponsoring petroleum companies.
The aims of the database are three-fold:
Assemble provenance data from onshore and offshore Greenland, Faroe Islands, Norway and neighbouring areas.
Make the data easily assessable to the petroleum industry and research institutions for visualisation and statistical analysis through a web application.
Facilitate research as well as development of new provenance tools and techniques that can reduce exploration risk.
View of The North Atlantic Provenance Database
Zircon ages available in the database as of July 2019. Yellow and blue dots represent the different samples and the surrounding bars visualise age data.