Structural styles: data and techniques for evaluation

Exploring for Oil and Gas Traps
Series	Treatise in Petroleum Geology
Part	Predicting the occurrence of oil and gas traps
Chapter	Exploring for structural traps
Author	R.A. Nelson, T.L. Patton, S. Serra
Link	Web page
Store	AAPG Store

What is a structural style?

Structural styles or structural families are associations of structures that often occur together due to a common origin. For example, major foreland thrust belts usually contain a mixture of listric, reverse, or decollement thrust faults, large asymmetric hanging wall folds, and late listric normal faults. These features are arranged to form an overall arcuate deformed belt. There is little or no involvement of mechanical basement in the deformation. Individual structures generally have good strike continuity and poor depth or dip continuity. Hence, in any newly discovered thrust belt, these same associations (thrust belt structural style) would be anticipated, modified somewhat by local geology. The concept of structural styles and their classification are given in Harding and Lowell and Lowell.

Choosing techniques

Figure 1 Summary of where different techniques and tools can be applied.

If and when one or more structural styles are ascribed to an area, certain of the structural techniques become more important to perform than others. The list below displays those techniques (keyed to the numbers in Figure 1.

Style	Very Important*
Thrust belts	5, 8, 10, 12
Wrench systems	1, 3, 11
Rifts and detached normal fault systems	2, 8, 10, 12, 15
Diapiric	2, 12
Foreland block folds	3, 6, 8
Basement warps and sags	2, 6, 8, 11

See also

• How different structural philosophies govern techniques

External links

find literature about Structural styles: data and techniques for evaluation

• Original content in Datapages
• Find the book in the AAPG Store