page_title: Northern North Sea basin
section_title: Tectonostratigraphic model
hierarchical_section_title: Northern North Sea basin / Tectonostratigraphic model
caption_attribution_description: English: Cartoon representation of the Mckenzie model of continental rifting, showing state at end of rifting and at end of post-rift subsidence
context_page_description: The North Sea is part of the Atlantic Ocean in northern Europe. It is located between Norway and Denmark in the east, Scotland and England in the west, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France in the south.
  The geology of the North Sea describes the geological features such as channels, trenches, and ridges today and the geological history, plate tectonics, geological events that created them.
  A geological basin is a large low-lying area or depression. It is often below sea level. Depressions are typically formed by tectonic processes acting on the lithosphere, providing "accommodation space" for sediment to be preserved. Basins are formed in a variety of tectonic settings: extensional, compressional, strike-slip and intraplate.
  Geological basins are one of the most common places which collect sediment. The type of rocks which form there tell about the palaeoclimate of the continent. The geology is of interest to oil prospectors, hydrologists and palaeontologists. Exploration in the North Sea was initiated in May 1964 when the first well was spudded and the area has now become one of the most prolific hydrocarbon provinces in the world.
context_section_description: In the northern North Sea, despite the substantial amount of data available, our understanding of the lithospheric processes governing extension are strongly model-based.  The architecture and signature of the sediment infill in the northern North Sea can be discussed in the context of three distinct evolutionary stages of rift basin development separated by key geologic unconformities.  The proto-rift stage describes the rift onset with either doming or flexural subsidence.  Tabular architectures thickening across relatively steep faults, characterize the proto-rift stage.  Active stretching and rotation of fault blocks then occurs during the main rift stage is then terminated by the development of the syn-rift unconformity.  Syn-rift architectures can be highly variable depending on the ability of the available sediment supply to fill accommodation formed by rotation and subsidence during this stage.  Where crustal separation is accomplished, a break-up unconformity commonly marks the boundary to the overlying thermal relaxation of post-rift stage.  During the post-rift stage, an early phase with coarse clastic infilling of remnant rift topography often precedes late stage widening of the basin and filling with fine-grained sediments. These processes have been attributed to pure shear (crustal extension and faulting in the upper crust) and simple shear (ductile stretching in the lower crust) and coupled simple shear/pure shear flexural deformation.  The combined thermal and elastic/isostatic response of the lithosphere to extension controls the crustal architecture and thereby the geometry of sedimentary basins, including those of the northern North Sea.
caption: McKenzie model (pure shear)
exif: {}