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Black Sea Overview Basin Study
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The one-volume Study Managerial overview of the Black Sea and Environs.
This study comprises coloured illustrations and text and could be supplied as a series of viewgraphs for immediate presentation to the Management. The philosophy of this study is to explain the local hydrocarbon structure within the framework of the regional basin dynamics, from the Carpathians through to the Crimea and to the Caucasus/Caspian.

Although this Overview encompasses the whole region from the Eastern Carpathians to the Caucasus, it establishes the essential framework/relationship between the overall dynamics at a "mega" scale and the local structure and sedimentation. This inference is essential for the exploration of the Black Sea shelf.




PLATE TECTONIC MODEL OF THE BLACK SEA REGION AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE HYDROCARBON-BEARING STRUCTURE - AN OVERVIEW:

The Black Sea plate boundaries were defined for the first time in 1970 by this Dr C Roman. However, with very few exceptions the plate tectonic evolution models proposed in the last twenty years proved unsatisfactory for the Black Sea, which fitted mostly on the 'outskirts' of the model area, rather than at the centre of it : more specifically, the plate tectonic models proposed to date dealt primarily either with the Western Mediterranean , or with the Eastern Mediterranean, or indeed, with the limit of the eastern Anatolian/Arabian plates .

In all above cases, the dynamics of the Black Sea basin could NOT be fully understood in an evolutionary sense, as the picture was incomplete. Moreover certain areas such as the Black Sea`s Northern Shelf, the Crimean peninsula, the Azov Sea and sometimes even the Caspian Sea appear as rigid entities, unaffected dynamically by the models proposed for the central part of the Black Sea basin .

This paper makes the whole of the Black Sea offshore (and the adjacent onshore) the focus of structural analysis of an area which stretches from the Carpathians to the Caucasus and from the Southern Ukraine and Sothwest Russia to the North Anatolian fault. A present-day geodynamic model is proposed for the entire Black Sea, Azov Sea and Marmara Sea

The model proposed has the double advantage, on one hand of explaining, at a regional level, the relationship between the major rhegmatic faults and structural units, such as the Eastern Carpathians vs. the Mid Black Sea Ridge vs. the Shatzky Ridge vs. the Great Caucasus and on the other hand, a second advantage is offering a framework for correlating the regional dynamics to the local structure in a coherent and orderly way.

This latter aspect should be of great advantage to the oil and gas explorationists as particular examples of correlation between the mega tectonics and the local hydrocarbon structures are considered for Southern Ukraine, Southwest Russia and the Caucasus

A regional geodynamic conceptual cross-section is proposed for the Black Sea and the present geodynamic model is made to illustrate the evolution from the Cretaceous to the Present.

An analysis of the styles of hydrocarbon traps is presented, together with a regional correlation of Stratigraphy.