| Popis: |
Summary Many important geological contexts, such as salt basins and foothill regions, are characterized by highly deformed structures. Restoring these structures allows understanding the geometry and extension of features, such as turbiditic fairways, that are very important targets in the petroleum exploration of these zones. Multiple restoration tools exist, but they are generally not adapted to an exploration workflow in regional contexts, where data is scarce and uncertainty is high. In this paper, we present a new unfolding method, which is based on the flexural slip paradigm and realized through an efficient application of conformal maps. The method is streamlined, quick and robust, and allows an interactive understanding of very folded and fractured domains such as salt basins. We also present an application of the method to the study of turbiditic fairways in a salt basin located in the deep offshore of West Africa. The method allowed a better understanding of the directions of the turbiditic flows, which are constrained by the tectonic of salt structures. In particular, the method allowed discovering some previously unseen changes in turbiditic flow directions, which highlight the role of the transpressive corridor that dominates the interplay between two different structural cells. |
