Strike-slip faulting in the West Siberian Platform: Insights from 3D seismic imagery

The 3D seismic exploration, actively deployed in recent years on much of the West Siberian Platform – one of the worldʹs largest oil and gas bearing basins – has brought out extensive development of a system of strike-slip faults within the basement. The fault system causes local structural and fluid flow anomalies within the Jurassic-Cretaceous sedimentary section, which is known to accommodate a multitude of large oil and gas deposits. This article will show the distribution geography and the scale of the basement strike-slip tectonics, and explain why this phenomenon, so clearly highlighted by 3D seismic, was not discovered earlier. The article will also consider how strike-slip faults are detected in the sedimentary cover and how they impact the characteristics of oil and gas fields located in their vicinity.