Comparison of Deepwater Mass Transport Complex Settings: West Texas; South-Central Pyrenees, Spain; Northern Calcareous Alps, Austria

Amerman, Robert¹, Bruce Trudgill¹, Eric P. Nelson¹, Michael H. Gardner², Pau Arbués³, Jim Borer⁴, Julian Clark⁵, Grace L. Ford⁶, Hugo Ortner⁷, Douglas Paton¹, Piret Plink-Björklund¹, David Pyles¹ (1) Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO (2) Montana State University, Billings, MT (3) University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain (4) El Paso Corporation, Denver, CO (5) Chevron Energy Technology Company, San Ramon, CA (6) EOG Resources, Denver, CO (7) University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

Submarine mass transport complexes (MTCs) are an important component of deepwater stratigraphic successions. They indicate basin or hinterland reorganization, control the location and geometry of overlying sand reservoirs, and may act as barriers to fluid flow. MTCs comprise a significant portion of the sedimentary fill of three paleo-deepwater basins: the Delaware Basin, west Texas; an-unnamed basin containing the Gosau Group at Muttekopf, Northern Calcareous Alps, Austria; and the Ainsa Basin, Pyrenees, Spain. These basins vary with respect to degree of syndepositional tectonism, degree of confinement by basin size and geometry, and sediment composition.

Among these three basins, MTCs display both similarities and differences with respect to: 1) types and styles of soft-sediment structures, 2) internal stratigraphic architecture, 3) degree of bedding coherence, 4) hierarchal and areal distribution, 5) position in stratigraphic cycles, 6) volume, and 7) relationships to reservoir-quality sands and underlying topography.

Data collected to date during this ongoing study suggest that deepwater MTCs may possess certain fundamental characteristics (e.g., some types of internal structures, position in stratigraphic cycles) that do not vary with respect to differences in setting but that may vary in other respects (e.g., internal stratigraphic organization, areal distribution, internal bedding coherence) that are a function of the three basin variables described above.