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In 2013, Nalcor announced the mapping of three newly defined sedimentary basins off the Labrador coast (the Henley, Chidley and Holton Basins) as well as the extension of the previously defined Hawke Basin. This mapping was based on the Nalcor and TGS regional 2D seismic surveys conducted in 2011 and 2012. These newly defined sedimentary basins are located primarily in deep water in the Labrador Sea, off the east coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. To date there has been no regional study of the Metocean conditions offshore Newfoundland and Labrador, and as part of Nalcor's exploration strategy, a metocean study was seen as a crucial piece of information in an area of frontier exploration. Nalcor commissioned C-CORE to characterize the metocean environment, covering topics such as winds, waves, currents, icing, fog, pack ice, icebergs and ice islands, changes in conditions expected due to climatic change and comparisons with other frontier regions. Conditions were summarized for 391 study area sub-sections (mostly one degree longitude by half degree latitude blocks). While there is a perception that the Labrador Sea is essentially an arctic environment, it is subarctic and conducive to oil and gas exploration and development. While the pack ice and iceberg regime is challenging along the Labrador coast, conditions improve substantially further offshore in deeper water. The regional characterization of iceberg frequency was difficult due to limited data, as most surveillance effort has been focused on and immediately north of the northeast Grand Banks in support of existing oil and gas production operations in the Jeanne d'Arc Basin. The characterization of iceberg frequency in the deep water basins was achieved through analysis of archived Envisat satellite data. The quantification of the sea ice and iceberg presence for these areas shows that the ice risk is significantly less than off Greenland and near-shore Labrador, and over much of the deep water basins similar to (or even less than) the Grand Banks.

A regional long-offset 2D seismic reflection program undertaken along the Labrador margin of the Labrador Sea, Canada, and complemented by the acquisition of coincident gravity data, has provided an extensive data set with which to image and model the sparsely investigated outer shelf, slope, and deepwater regions. Previous interpretation of the seismic data revealed the extent of Mesozoic and Cenozoic basins and resulted in the remapping of the basin configuration for the entire margin. To map the synrift package and improve understanding of the geometry and extent of these basins, we have undertaken joint seismic interpretation and gravity forward modeling to reduce uncertainty in the identification of the prerift basement, which varies between Paleozoic shelfal deposits and Precambrian crystalline rocks, with similar density characteristics. With this iterative approach, we have obtained new depth to basement constraints and have deduced further constraints on crustal thickness variations along the Labrador margin. At the crustal scale, extreme localized crustal thinning has been revealed along the southern and central portions of the Labrador margin, whereas a broad, margin-parallel zone of thicker crust has been detected outboard of the continental shelf along the northern Labrador margin. Our final gravity models suggest that Late Cretaceous rift packages from further south extend along the entire Labrador margin and open the possibility of a Late Cretaceous source rock fairway extending into the Labrador basins.