| Summary: | Structural styles and stratigraphic patterns along North Atlantic margins display a large spectrum of complexity and variability. An extensive amount of subsurface data from the north-central and south-western Barents Sea are used to: (1) at a larger scale understand how various plate tectonics regimes controlled structuring, faulting and sedimentation along the northern and southern margins of the Barents Sea; (2) at a smaller scale understand how the structural evolution of basin bounding faults impacted sedimentation in basins which were affected by one or more phases and multiple directions of extension; and (3) improve the knowledge about the paleogeography of the Barents Sea. In order to fulfil these objectives, this research consists of a systematic analysis which is summarized in five journal articles. Paper 1 improves the existing knowledge of the Early Cretaceous tectonostratigraphic development of the north-central Barents Sea based on observations from subsurface data, structural and plate tectonic restorations in an area distal from the northern margin of the Barents Sea. As result of this work, compressional tectonics in the Early Cretaceous is suggested to be induced by the opening of the Canada Basin which triggered reactivation of Late Palaeozoic normal faults in reverse mode. Reverse movement along these faults caused the formation of NE oriented structural highs and anticlines, which controlled and routed the progradation of Lower Cretaceous clastic material from the northern to the southern margins of the Barents Sea. The second paper focuses on understanding the Early Cretaceous structural evolution of the Tromsø Basin (proximal southern margin of the Barents Sea) in the context of the geodynamic processes acting in the southwestern Barents Sea. We propose an Early Cretaceous structural evolution of the Tromsø Basin which explains the formation of compressional features during rifting in the south-western Barents Sea. 2D gravity modelling and 2D structural restoration along a key regional ...
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