Paper Summary
We describe a recently acquired multi-client survey over part of Hatton Bank and Basin some 750km west of Scotland. Figure 1 shows the location of the new and existing long offset lines. The area forms part of the Rockall plateau an area known to be underlain by continental crust. It includes a number of large central igneous complexes which have been mapped by the British Geological Survey (BGS) using seismic and potential field methods and sampled by shallow drilling (Hitchen, 2004). These centres have produced basaltic lavas covering most of the area but locally they are thin or absent and steeply dipping and folded sediments have been imaged in these areas using low fold short offset “high resolution” acquisition. BGS boreholes 99/1 and 99/2A located on Hatton Bank over the largest of the basalt “windows” sampled midcretaceous shales and sandstones close to the seabed. As the area is considered to have hydrocarbon potential (Gatliff et al., 2003) TGS carried out a regional survey in 2007 with the object of better imaging the Mesozoic sediments both within the windows and if possible beneath areas where the lavas are thicker.
