200px, right Long Forties is a zone of the northern

North Sea The North Sea lies between Great Britain, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. An epeiric sea on the European continental shelf, it connects to the Atlantic Ocean through the English Channel in the south and the Norwegian S ...

that is fairly consistently deep.

Extent

Long Forties are between the northeast coasts of

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...

and the southwest coast of

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and t ...

, centred about 57°N 0°30′E; compare to the

Broad Fourteens 200px, The Broad Fourteens on a map by Delisle (1743) The Broad Fourteens is an area of the southern North Sea that is fairly consistently deep. Thus, on a nautical chart with depths given in fathoms, a broad area with many "14" notations can be ...

Alternative terms

Forties

The

Shipping Forecast The Shipping Forecast is a BBC Radio broadcast of weather reports and forecasts for the seas around the coasts of the British Isles. It is produced by the Met Office and broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. ...

area Forties approximates, simply with neater borders, Long Forties. The north of the latter falls in Viking.

Fladen Grounds

Fladen Grounds is the next more northern, eastern and deeper part of the sea. The Dutch weather service KNMI, and Norwegian equivalent, use their tongues' similar names for and meaning Fladen Grounds instead of Forties and most of

Viking Vikings ; non, víkingr is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and se ...

. The Swedish weather institute, which reported for this zone until 2005 followed these leads.

Etymology

When depth sounding (originally fathoming with rope and plumb weight), the recorded depth would for a long haul remain 40 fathoms. On a traditional imperial measurements

nautical chart A nautical chart is a graphic representation of a sea area and adjacent coastal regions. Depending on the scale of the chart, it may show depths of water and heights of land (topographic map), natural features of the seabed, details of the coa ...

a great zone with many "40"s appears.

Geology

The Forties Oil Field is the largest oil field of the sea, east of

Aberdeen Aberdeen (; sco, Aiberdeen ; gd, Obar Dheathain ; la, Aberdonia) is a city in North East Scotland, and is the third most populous city in the country. Aberdeen is one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas (as Aberdeen City), and ...

. It was discovered in 1970 and first produced oil in 1975 under ownership of British Petroleum. The Forties Formation consists of a lower Shale Member and an upper Sandstone Member, which were deposited in a "middle and lower submarine fan environment". The initial development plan included a "complete replacement seawater injection system" starting in 1975. When the field was sold in 2003, reservoir engineers estimated the STOIIP (original oil in place) was .Hill, P.J., and Wood, G.V., 1980, Geology of the Forties Field, U.K. Continental Shelf, North Sea, in Giant Oil and Gas Fields of the Decade:1968-1978, AAPG Memoir 30, Tulsa: American Association of Petroleum Geologists, , p. 81.

References

Geography of Europe North Sea Shipping Forecast areas {{Scotland-geo-stub