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US Atlantic Margin Gas Hydrates

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World Atlas of Submarine Gas Hydrates in Continental Margins

Abstract

The minimum distribution of gas hydrates on the US Atlantic margin is from offshore South Carolina northward to the longitude of Shallop Canyon on the southern New England margin. Few wells have logged or sampled the gas hydrate zone on this margin, meaning that the presence of gas hydrates is inferred based primarily on seismic data that reveal bottom simulating reflections, mostly at water depths greater than 2000 m. The highest hydrate saturation levels most likely exist in the sandy sediment of the Whale Prospect offshore New Jersey, New York and the western part of Cape Cod, an area characterized by strong bottom simulating reflections. Such reflections are also imaged on the well-studied Blake Ridge, where fine-grained sediment host lower hydrate saturation levels, which have been constrained by drilling. Within the section of the margin stretching from south of Cape Hatteras nearly to Hudson Canyon, the diagnostic seismic reflections are hard to discern, making inferences about gas hydrate distributions more uncertain. The recognition of currently unmapped bottom simulating reflections or top of gas features seaward of the 2000 m bathymetric contour (e.g., Cape Fear Slide, Currituck slide, beneath deepwater gas seeps) within the Mid-Atlantic Bight expands the area of probable gas hydrates on this margin.

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Acknowledgements

Carolyn Ruppel was supported by the USGS Gas Hydrates Project and a DOE-USGS Interagency Agreement 89243320SFE000013. William Danforth (USGS) prepared the original version of Fig. 24.7, and John Miller (USGS) reprocessed the seismic data shown in Fig. 24.8 for the Extended Continental Shelf project. A review by Patrick Hart improved the manuscript. We are grateful to generations of US Department of Interior scientists who have studied gas hydrates on the USAM and documented their findings and data so clearly. Airgun data shown in this article are available from Arsenault et al. (2017), Hornbach (2010), Triezenberg et al. (2016) and from the Marine Geoscience Data System (marine-geo.org) for ENAM seismic reflection lines. Any use of trade, firm or product name is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the US Government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. US Geological Survey, Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center, Woods Hole, MA, USA

    Carolyn D. Ruppel, Nathaniel C. Miller & Deborah Hutchinson

  2. Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management, New Orleans, LA, USA

    William Shedd

  3. Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, US Geological Survey, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Jared Kluesner

  4. Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management, Sterling, VA, USA

    Matthew Frye

Authors
  1. Carolyn D. Ruppel
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  2. William Shedd
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  3. Nathaniel C. Miller
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  4. Jared Kluesner
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  5. Matthew Frye
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  6. Deborah Hutchinson
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Carolyn D. Ruppel .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. CAGE—Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate, Department of Geosciences, UiT—The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway

    Jürgen Mienert

  2. GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

    Christian Berndt

  3. College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Anne M. Tréhu

  4. National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics—OGS, Sgonico, Trieste, Italy

    Angelo Camerlenghi

  5. National Taiwan University Ocean Center, Taipei, Taiwan

    Char-Shine Liu

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© 2022 This is a U.S. government work and not under copyright protection in the U.S.; foreign copyright protection may apply

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Ruppel, C.D., Shedd, W., Miller, N.C., Kluesner, J., Frye, M., Hutchinson, D. (2022). US Atlantic Margin Gas Hydrates. In: Mienert, J., Berndt, C., Tréhu, A.M., Camerlenghi, A., Liu, CS. (eds) World Atlas of Submarine Gas Hydrates in Continental Margins. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81186-0_24

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