Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
That red blob is the Viewfield Crater, about a kilometre deep. Several wells, including vertical wells, have been removed from the graphic, but you can see them in the one below. Chinook Consulting Services
Happy Valentine’s Day, courtesy the geology of southeast Saskatchewan, Chinook Consulting Services and Pipeline Online.
The Viewfield astrobleme in southeast Saskatchewan is shaped like a heart, with Bakken wells pointing at it from all sides.
An “astrobleme” is a “star wound,” basically an impact crater from a meteor. Think of it as a blemish from the stars.
Chinook Consulting Services was kind enough to post these graphics on their LinkedIn page. You should really follow them, as they post some of the coolest well graphics of Saskatchewan Pipeline Online has ever seen.
As for the Viewfield Crater, around 190 million years ago, a rock the size of a school bus or so came hurtling out of the sky and went >splat< about six miles south of the current town of Stoughton, Saskatchewan. The crater is about a mile and a half across. When it hit, the Bakken formation was only a few hundred metres deep, so such an impact clearly had a shattering effect on the underlying strata in the area.
In the intervening 190 million years +/- 20 million years, that crater was buried by the sediments of numerous shallow seas and eventually was burried by a bout a kilometre of sediment.
The crater was discovered in seismic data accumulated through oil exploraiton in the area. It’s one of only a few identified astroblemes (impact craters) known in Saskatchewan, and indeed, of a few dozen in Canada.
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Geologist H.B. Sawatzky did extensive work on it in the 1970s, long before the 3D seismic tools of today were available. His first paper on it was in 1972, when the crater was discovered.
You can learn more about the Viewfield Crater here.
Charles O’Dale’s website CraterExplorer.ca describes it like this:
“The Viewfield structure (103°04’W; 49°35’N) is considered to be a 2.4 km simple crater formed in Jura-Triassic time (~ 200 Ma), based on geophysical and drill hole data. Target rocks consist of Mississippian strata, of which at least 200 m are missing in the center of the structure and replaced by young Watrous Red Beds (WRB). In the rim, Mississippian carbonates are found sandwiched between Lower WRB. There are 50 producing hydrocarbon wells, with estimated primary reserves of 10.5 MMBO and 4.5 BCFG. An impact origin for the structure was suggested by Sawatzky [6]. Detrital quartz grains in the WRB display decorated PDFs. The specific nature of these grains and their very limited occurrence in materials overlying and filling the crater suggest they were washed into the Lower WRB. (Grieve 1998).”
There are a LOT more wells around there today.
Famed Saskatchewan geologist John Lake once even cored the center of the crater. He told Pipeline Online all the strata was up and down instead of horizontal.
What’s even more curious is that the highest concentrations of lithium in brine in Canada reported to date have been found just a mile or so west of the crater, in the deeper Duperow formation. That’s now the site of EMP Metal’s Aurora Project, which Pipeline Online will be writing an update on soon. That begs the question: What, if any, influence did the meteorite impact crater have on lithium? Is it a fluke that the highest concentrations were found so close to the crater, or is that prevalent on a wider regional basis?
This is the Google Earth view, with the crater in the center section. Note Highway 47 along the right side of the map, and the Fleet Energy site in the bottom right. Google Maps
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And on a more extended note – did the crater have any impact on the Viewfield Bakken oilfield in the area? Did it create stuctural traps for oil to collect in? It sure seems that way, given the number of wells surrounding it.
Here’s Chinook’s graphic overlaid on the Google Map, matching the roads. Notice the road along the south side of the crater almost exactly follows its southern edge? Coincidence? Chinook Consulting/Google Maps
And if you’ve ever driven the grid roads in the area, you will find in the immediate vicinity of the crater, the east west roads are not at all straight. Did the crater affect the surveyors’ instruments way back when?
You can drive those roads yourself. Just go west from Fleet Energy’s Viewfield facility. The crater will be on the north side of the road, starting a mile from the highway.
So if you forgot to buy flowers, take your honey for a drive to Viewfield. Turn west at the Fleet Energy site, and tell your sweetheart you’re driving her to the largest heart around. Then show her this story. She’ll surely appreciate it.
Maybe buy chocolates instead, in the shape of hearts.
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