Turbidite field course, SE Spain


Trainer(s): Mark Bouman
Duration: 5 days

Business context

This field course offers an extensive series of outcrop examinations, field-based correlation, reservoir description, instruction and exercises. It aims to familiarize the student with the stratigraphy, shape, and scale of submarine fan bodies in a small active basin. The value of sequence stratigraphic approaches, paleo-bathymetric analyses, and structural setting of the basin on predicting the large-scale character of fan deposits will be addressed in an appraisal and development context.

Who should attend

The course is designed for multi-disciplinary audiences of exploration and production geologists, geophysicists and petroleum engineers who need a basic understanding of deep-marine sediments or an in-depth view of submarine fan architectural element.

Course content

  • Seismic to individual bed-scale appreciation of the architecture and elements of a deepwater system.
  • Relationships between tectonics and sedimentation.
  • Onlap relationships associated with sandy and mixed sand/mud turbidite systems. Process sedimentology.
  • State of art turbidite system evaluation.
  • Basics of massflow processes and their relevance to reservoir heterogeneity and stratigraphic trap geometries.
  • Use of / and pitfalls of subsurface analogue examples in turbidite system evaluation

Learning, methods and tools

At the end of the course participants can apply deep water depositional processes to unreavel turbidites in their own fields.

At most outcrops attendees work in small teams.This course takes place in the Tabernas basin in SE Spain.

Day by day programme

Day 1 - Mass Flow Processes. Introduction/basin-fill geometry.

Day 2 - Continuity of sheet-like turbidites. Mixed sand-mud turbidite system sheet reservoir sands.

Day 3 - Amalgamated turbidites and their pinch-out geometry.

Day 4 - Channelized turbidites. Channel complex, basin floor topography and erosional channels.

Day 5 - Main deep-marine feeder complex. Vertical and lateral changes in reservoir quality in main sediment conduit. Team exercise.