The Irish Rockall Trough is a frontier area recently opened for hydrocarbon exploration. The Trough, a NE-SW trending Mesozoic-Cenozoic basin, lies in water depths ranging between 500 m and 3000 m. Basin development began as early as the Late Carboniferous and a series of rift episodes continued sporadically throughout the Mesozoic and Tertiary. The most important of these occurred between the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous. The post-rift thermal sag phase followed in the Late Cretaceous and Tertiary. The resultant basin is characterized by thinned continental crust, a series of tilted fault blocks and a number of smaller 'perched' basins adjacent to the main basin-bounding faults.This paper presents an assessment of the petroleum prospectivity of the Rockall Trough by focusing on its stratigraphic and structural development, integrating the results from modelling work and providing concise play models. A suite of regional palaeogeographic maps are used to develop a full understanding of the stratigraphic history of the Trough. A structural modelling study is then discussed in which two regional seismic lines are interpreted and flexurally back-stripped. Finally, a source-rock modelling study is presented whereby the timing and extent of oil and gas explusion within the potential kitchen areas are examined. The conclusions of this work are illustrated on a series of play concept diagrams. a frontier challenge.

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The use of the Wasserstein distance for identifying optimal landscape evolution models is demonstrated • This approach can produce simple objective functions, simplifying the search for models that minimize data misfit • Accurate amplitudes and locations of uplift can be retrieved from synthetic landscapes generated using different initial conditions

Extricating histories of uplift and erosion from landscapes is crucial for many branches of the Earth sciences. An objective way to calculate such histories is to identify calibrated models that minimise misfit between observations (e.g. topography) and predictions (e.g. synthetic landscapes). A challenge is to make use of entire (two-dimensional) landscapes to identify optimal models. In the presence of natural or computational noise, for example arbitrary noise introduced to force channelisation, the widely used Euclidean measures of similarity (e.g. root mean square differences between elevations) unfortunately can have very complicated objective functions. Such complexity obscures the search for optimal models. Instead, we introduce the Wasserstein distance as a means to measure misfit between observed and theoretical landscapes. We first demonstrate its use with a one-dimensional topographic transect. We then show how it can be used to identify optimal uplift histories from synthetic landscapes in the presence of noise.

The use of the Wasserstein distance for identifying optimal landscape evolution models is demonstrated.• This approach can produce simple objective functions, simplifying the search for models that minimise data misfit.• Accurate amplitudes and locations of uplift can be retrieved from synthetic landscapes generated using different initial conditions.