Cretaceous provenance, sediment supply and source-to-sink evolution in the Greater Barents Sea Basin

The Greater Barents Sea Basin (GBSB) is a unique area in the Arctic, as it hosts relatively well-preserved large-scale Cretaceous progradational wedges. Multiple regional studies document temporal and spatial variations in clinoform progradation directions and sedimentation styles across different parts of the GBSB and reveal a fundamental tectonically driven reorganization of drainage systems during the Early Cretaceous. This study uses an integrated source-to-sink approach combining regional seismic datasets with new detrital zircon U-Pb ages from the analysis of 11 samples spanning Valanginian to Campanian that are combined with seismic interpretation and mass balance calculations. This work presents a unified chronostratigraphic frame for the whole GBSB and correlates internal changes to large-scale plate tectonic events, and major volcanism, in the source area and the Arctic in general. It reveals that sediment input varied throughout the Cretaceous with low sediment input from local sources in the Late Jurassic-Hauterivian, which dramatically increased in the Barremian due to High Arctic large Igneous Province (HALIP) activity. Relatively high sediment input took place in the Albian-Cenomanian due to catchment reorganization, followed by relatively low sediment input in the Turonian-Coniacian with a last increase in the Campanian. A new provenance dataset, including new zircon data, confirms a catchment reorganization to a dominant northeasterly source, and constrains this change to the Aptian-Albian.