Pore Pressure Regimes of the Northern Barents Shelf: Implications for Fluid Flow

• Published in: AAPG Bulletin
• Main Author: Birchall, Thomas Charles David
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Arctic; Svalbard; Svalbard Archipelago
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10852/83756; http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-86489

The ground beneath our feet is anything but dry; there is more water held in Earth’s rocks than all the world’s oceans combined. Fluids in the subsurface are always on the move and understanding this is important in the fields of hydrocarbon exploration, CO2 storage and hydrogeology. Pore pressure is the pressure of fluids found within rock pore spaces and is the principal driver of subsurface fluid movement. Abnormally high pore pressures are a well-documented phenomenon throughout the world, whereas abnormally low pore pressures are rare and poorly understood. The northern Barents shelf provides a globally unique example of the latter, where extremely low pore pressures are observed offshore and onshore. The candidate’s PhD research shows that all cases of abnormally low pressure have undergone geologically recent uplift and typically occur at relatively shallow depths. In the Barents shelf, including the High Arctic Svalbard archipelago, low pressures must have developed in the last few thousand years and are in a present state of disequilibrium. Indeed, this disequilibrium has probably driven geologically recent fluid migration and is almost certainly still happening today.