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 ; , ; ) is a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean, located off the northern coasts of Norway and Russia and divided between Norwegian and Russian territorial waters.World Wildlife Fund, 2008. It was known earlier among Russi ...

. Lying off

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

on the

continental shelf A continental shelf is a portion of a continent that is submerged under an area of relatively shallow water, known as a shelf sea. Much of these shelves were exposed by drops in sea level during glacial periods. The shelf surrounding an islan ...

between the

Kola Peninsula The Kola Peninsula (; ) is a peninsula in the extreme northwest of Russia, and one of the largest peninsulas of Europe. Constituting the bulk of the territory of Murmansk Oblast, it lies almost completely inside the Arctic Circle and is border ...

and

Novaya Zemlya Novaya Zemlya (, also , ; , ; ), also spelled , 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, considered the extreme points of Europe ...

, 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 () is a Russian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. It is inhabited only by military personnel. It constitutes the northernmost part of Arkhangelsk Oblast and consists of 192 islands, which cover an area of , stretching from east ...

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 first of three geological eras of the Phanerozoic Eon. Beginning 538.8 million years ago (Ma), it succeeds the Neoproterozoic (the last era of the Proterozoic Eon) and ends 251.9 Ma at the start of ...

and continuing through to the early

Cretaceous The Cretaceous ( ) is a geological period that lasted from about 143.1 to 66 mya (unit), million years ago (Mya). It is the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era (geology), Era, as well as the longest. At around 77.1 million years, it is the ...

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 period approximately 335 mi ...

, 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 ...

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

Ural Mountains The Ural Mountains ( ),; , ; , or simply the Urals, are a mountain range in Eurasia that runs north–south mostly through Russia, from the coast of the Arctic Ocean to the river Ural (river), Ural and northwestern Kazakhstan.

suture zone, 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