The Barents Sea is an epicontinental shelf sea with a fragmented structure consisting of long fault complexes, basins and basement highs. Fluid leakage from deep-seated hydrocarbon accumulations is a widespread phenomenon and mostly related to its denudation history during the glacial/interglacial cycles. In this study, we aimed to better understand shallow fluid flow processes that have led to the ...

Large national programs in the United States and several Asian countries have defined and characterised their marine methane hydrate occurrences in some detail, but European hydrate occurrence has received less attention. The European Union-funded project “Marine gas hydrate – an indigenous resource of natural gas for Europe” (MIGRATE) aimed to determine the European potential inventory of exploitable ...

During expedition MARIA S. MERIAN MSM57/2 to the Svalbard margin offshore Prins Karls Forland, the seafloor drill rig MARUM‐MeBo70 was used to assess the landward termination of the gas hydrate system in water depths between 340 and 446 m. The study region shows abundant seafloor gas vents, clustered at a water depth of ∼400 m. The sedimentary environment within the upper 100 m below seafloor (mbsf) ...

Seafloor seepage sites along the Vestnesa Ridge off west-Svalbard have been, for decades, a natural laboratory for the studies of fluid flow and gas hydrate dynamics at passive continental margins. The lack of ground truth evidence for fluid composition and gas hydrate abundance deep in the sediment sequence however prohibits us from further assessing the current model of pockmark evolution from the ...

High-resolution 3D site characterization can deliver reliable quantitative property volumes of the subsurface when based on seismic data able to image meter-sized objects. Following the theoretical analysis of seismic wave propagation in the shallow sub-surface, we present case studies based on re-processing of 3D P-Cable seismic data. The case study of data re-processing from the Vestnesa Ridge ...

Recent observations of extensive methane release into the oceans and atmosphere have raised concern as to whether rising temperatures across the Arctic could drive rapid destabilization of gas hydrate reservoirs. Here, we report modelling results from hydrate-modulated methane seepage from Vestnesa Ridge, offshore western Svalbard, suggesting that continuous leakage has occurred from the seafloor ...

Evaluation of seismic reflection data has identified the presence of fluid escape structures cross-cutting overburden stratigraphy within sedimentary basins globally. Seismically-imaged chimneys/pipes are considered to be possible pathways for fluid flow, which may hydraulically connect deeper strata to the seabed. The properties of fluid migration pathways through the overburden must be constrained ...

The presence of a gas hydrate reservoir and free gas layer along the South Shetland margin (offshore Antarctic Peninsula) has been well documented in recent years. In order to better characterize gas hydrate reservoirs, with a particular focus on the quantification of gas hydrate and free gas and the petrophysical properties of the subsurface, we performed travel time inversion of ocean-bottom ...

Methane seepage off the coast of Svalbard is demonstrated by active gas flares in the water column today and through precipitation of methane-derived authigenic carbonates (MDAC) over the past 160 000 years. Though submarine discharge of thermogenic methane is well documented, the geological history of past leakage is still debated, largely due to unconstrained free gas sources and seepage trigger ...

High-resolution 4D (HR4D) seismic data have the potential for improving the current state-of-the-art in detecting shallow (≤500−1000  m below seafloor) subsurface changes on a very fine scale (approximately 3–6 m). Time-lapse seismic investigations commonly use conventional broadband seismic data, considered low to moderate resolution in our context. We have developed the first comprehensive time ...