| Summary: | The Barents Sea is a broad, epicontinental Sea in northern Europe. With an area of about 1.4 million km² it extends from Novaya Zemlya (Russia) in the east to the continental slope of the Norwegian-Greenland Sea in the west, and from Svalbard and Franz Josef Land in the north to the northern coast of Norway and Russia in the south. The southwestern part of the Barents Sea is strongly characterized by its geological history with subsidence and uplift periods and several events of glacial erosion. The last glacial maximum (LGM) is one of the most important and best preserved glacial phases in this area. During the last decades the Barents Sea evolved into an oil and gas prospecting area. Several source rocks have been identified and hydrocarbon discoveries have been made. Additionally, indications for hydrocarbon seepage, so called “cold seeps” have been detected. These include extensive pockmark fields, carbonate crusts bearing areas and fault related gas flares. Leaking hydrocarbons, released by cold seeps, gained increasing attention during the last years for two reasons. First because they are potential indicators for underlying hydrocarbon reservoirs in the subsurface and second because emitted hydrocarbons, particularly methane as a greenhouse gas, are known to significantly affect the global climate when released to the atmosphere. In this thesis samples from different areas located in the Loppa High region in the southwestern Barents Sea were investigated. Two surface manifestations of cold seep systems such as huge pockmark areas and carbonate crust sites were studied in detail, in order to determine the activity, formation and spatial distribution of the different seepage structures as well as the origin and timing of the seeping hydrocarbon fluids. Therefore, samples, collected in three research cruises, were studied. These include sediment cores from pockmarks, reference sites and carbonate crust areas as well as carbonate crust samples. An interdisciplinary approach, applying organic geochemical, ...
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