UAF to conduct Arctic seismic survey

The University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute plans to conduct a National Science Foundation-funded 2-D seismic survey in the Chukchi Borderland of the Arctic Ocean between early September and early October 2011, UAF Associate Professor Bernard Coakley told the National Marine Fisheries Service Arctic Open-water Meeting March 8. The research vessel Marcus G. Langseth will be used for the survey, Coakley said.

The purpose of the survey will be to better understand how the Canada basin, the section of the Arctic Ocean immediately north of Alaska, formed. That in turn will enable a better understanding of the Mesozoic geology of the region. And the project will provide research for a doctoral student at UAF.

Many geologists think that the Canada basin opened by a counter-clockwise rotation of the Alaska North Slope away from northern Canada. But there is a general lack of data to support this theory and the Chukchi Borderland, a large region of continental crust protruding north from the continental shelf of the northern Chukchi Sea, presents a problem with this concept of basin formation, Coakley explained.

The UAF team plans to shoot a grid of 2-D seismic lines over the Chukchi Borderland, to obtain images of the stratification of the rocks in the Borderland continental shelf. Then, by running some seismic lines down into the northern Chukchi Sea, into the area of some oil exploration wells drilled by Shell around 1990, the team plans to determine the ages of the strata in the Chukchi Borderland by linking these strata through the seismic to known rocks encountered by the wells. A knowledge of the geologic structure of the Chukchi Borderland massif, together with information about the ages of the strata in the massif, should shed much needed light on the history of the Canada basin.

—Alan Bailey