The Chukchi Shelf or Chukchi Sea Shelf is the westernmost part of the continental shelf of the United States and the easternmost part of the continental shelf of Russia. In the west it merges with the Russian Siberian Shelf. Within this shelf, the 50-mile Chukchi Corridor acts as a passageway for one of the largest marine mammal migrations in the world.

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The main geological features of the Chukchi Shelf are the Hope Basin and the Herald Thrust, a basement uplift cored by Cretaceous thrust faults. The latter is named after Herald Island. Off the northwestern Alaskan coast there is a Jurassic rift basin, the Hannah Trough.^[1] To the north of Alaska the Chukchi Shelf extends to form the Chukchi Plateau which protrudes into the Arctic Ocean geological zone.

The Chukchi Shelf is shared between Russia and the United States according to the June 1990 USSR–USA Maritime Boundary Agreement.

The Chukchi Corridor is a 50-mile wide strip of ocean offshore of Northwest Alaska that acts as a passageway for one of the largest marine mammal migrations in the world.

The Chukchi Shelf and surrounding regions have a recent history of petroleum production and exploration, with development of the nearby North Slope region dominating petroleum production in Alaska with over 10 billion barrels of oil produced between 1977 and 2005.^[14] The stratigraphy and structural geology of the Chukchi Shelf have been studied due to it being a potential source area of sediment that filled the North Slope basin.

Studies using seismic reflection data in the Chukchi Shelf have shown that the structural history of the shelf is complex with multiple events of deformation from the Devonian through Cenozoic time.^[15] The structural deformation features of the shelf have been reactivated at least four different times, from thin-skinned crustal shortening creating a fold and thrust belt in the Devonian, to reactivation of thrust faults as normal faults during crustal extension in the Jurassic to create the Hanna Trough. These normal faults were then again reactivated as thrust faults in the southern shelf in the Jurassic, and reactivated as normal faults again in the early Cenozoic.^[16]

The process of deformational features being reactivated throughout different stress regimes in time is excellent evidence of structural inheritance, where previously used planes of weakness are used in both shortening and extensional regimes. These examples in the Chukchi Shelf show that structural inheritance can survive multiple deformational events through hundreds of millions of years. These concepts play a role in petroleum exploration since deformational planes of weakness can create or destroy petroleum plays depending on the surrounding stratigraphy.