The Barents Basin or East Barents Basin is a

sedimentary basin Sedimentary basins are region-scale depressions of the Earth's crust where subsidence has occurred and a thick sequence of sediments have accumulated to form a large three-dimensional body of sedimentary rock. They form when long-term subsidence ...

underlying the eastern half of the

Barents Sea The Barents Sea ( , also ; no, Barentshavet, ; russian: Баренцево море, Barentsevo More) is a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean, located off the northern coasts of Norway and Russia and divided between Norwegian and Russian ter ...

. Lying off

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eigh ...

on the continental shelf between the

Kola Peninsula sjd, Куэлнэгк нёа̄ррк , image_name= Kola peninsula.png , image_caption= Kola Peninsula as a part of Murmansk Oblast , image_size= 300px , image_alt= , map_image= Murmansk in Russia.svg , map_caption = Location of Murmansk Oblast ...

and

Novaya Zemlya Novaya Zemlya (, also , ; rus, Но́вая Земля́, p=ˈnovəjə zʲɪmˈlʲa, ) is an archipelago in northern Russia. It is situated in the Arctic Ocean, in the extreme northeast of Europe, with Cape Flissingsky, on the northern island ...

, it produces oil and gas.Funk, McKenzie (May 2009) "Arctic Landgrab" ''National Geographic'' 215(5): pp. 104–121 The Barents Basin is bordered by land and the Timan-Pechora Basin to the south, the Murmansk Rise and Murmansk Plateau to the west, the Admiralty High and the island of Novaya Zemlya to the east, and rise of

Franz Josef Land Franz Josef Land, Frantz Iosef Land, Franz Joseph Land or Francis Joseph's Land ( rus, Земля́ Фра́нца-Ио́сифа, r=Zemlya Frantsa-Iosifa, no, Fridtjof Nansen Land) is a Russian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. It is inhabited on ...

to the north. The Barents Basin is subdivided into the South Barents Basin (south of the Ludlov Saddle), the North Barents Basin, and the North Novaya Zemlya Basin. The latter two are separated by a major NW–SE fault.Doré, A. G. (1995) "Barents Sea Geology, Petroleum Resources and Commercial Potential" ''Arctic'' 48(3): pp. 207–221

Geology

Beginning in the late

Palaeozoic The Paleozoic (or Palaeozoic) Era is the earliest of three geologic eras of the Phanerozoic Eon. The name ''Paleozoic'' ( ;) was coined by the British geologist Adam Sedgwick in 1838 by combining the Greek words ''palaiós'' (, "old") and ' ...

and continuing through to the early

Cretaceous The Cretaceous ( ) is a geological period that lasted from about 145 to 66 million years ago (Mya). It is the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era, as well as the longest. At around 79 million years, it is the longest geological period of ...

sediments were deposited on the continental shelf of the supercontinent

Pangaea Pangaea or Pangea () was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. It assembled from the earlier continental units of Gondwana, Euramerica and Siberia during the Carboniferous approximately 335 millio ...

, these underlie the current Barents Basin which was created during the break-up of

. Beginning in the

rift zone A rift zone is a feature of some volcanoes, especially shield volcanoes, in which a set of linear cracks (or rifts) develops in a volcanic edifice, typically forming into two or three well-defined regions along the flanks of the vent. Believed t ...

opened between the Baltic Plate and the Siberian Plate, parallel to and west of the old

Ural Mountains The Ural Mountains ( ; rus, Ура́льские го́ры, r=Uralskiye gory, p=ʊˈralʲskʲɪjə ˈɡorɨ; ba, Урал тауҙары) or simply the Urals, are a mountain range that runs approximately from north to south through western ...

suture zone In structural geology, a suture is a joining together along a major fault zone, of separate terranes, tectonic units that have different plate tectonic, metamorphic and paleogeographic histories. The suture is often represented on the surface by ...

, represented here by Novaya Zemlya.

Oil and gas

The largest natural gas fields in the basin are the Shtokman field (Shtokmanovskoye or Stokmanovskaya) and the Ludlovskoye (Ludlovskaya) field. The Shtokman field in the northwestern South Barents Basin was discovered in 1988Lindquist, Sandra J
"South and North Barents Triassic-Jurassic Total Petroleum System of the Russian Offshore Arctic"
USGS Open File Report 99-50N, United States Geological Survey and has gas reserves of an estimated 2500 billion cubic meters. The Ludlovskoye field is on the Ludlov Saddle and was discovered in 1990. The Ledovoye field was discovered in 1991 and lies between the Shtokman field and the Ludlovskoye field.

Notes

{{regional-geology-stub Geology of European Russia Sedimentary basins of Europe Sedimentary basins of Russia Barents Sea