Australia's southern margin: a product of oblique extension

Abstract

Recently developed detachment models of continental margin formation interpret the southern margin of Australia to have formed when the lower-plate Australian margin was pulled out from beneath the upper-plate Antarctic margin. Data now available and summarised in this paper, point very strongly to a generally NW-SE direction of initial continental extension for the southern margin, in contrast to the widely held picture of simple N-S rifting. The evidence for this extension direction comes from the analysis of deep Seismic data acquired by the Bureau of Mineral Resources in 1986 in the central Great Australian Bight (GAB), the gravity field of the GAB, Seismic and magnetic basement structures in the Eyre Sub-basin, Polda Trough, Ceduna Depocentre and Duntroon Basin and from the analysis of the magnetic seafloor spreading anomalies produced during the slow first phase of drifting between Australia and Antarctica.Further, it is now believed that the formation of the southern margin of Australia can be described in terms of three phases of continental extension (El to E3) and two phases of drifting (D1 and D2). In summary, these phases were as follows. 1.E1: approximately 300 km of Late Jurassic (?or older) to Early Cretaceous NW-SE-oriented extension in the GAB, with strike-slip motion in the nascent Otway Basin and along the Tasmanian margin.2.E2: 120 km of Early Cretaceous NNE-SSW-oriented extension which formed the basins of southeastern Australia (Otway, Bass, Gippsland) and which probably produced a structural overprinting in the GAB Basin.3.E3/D1: minor continental extension and the first 500 km of slow drift between Australia and Antarctica on an azimuth of 165°; wrenching on the Tasmanian margin.4.D2: 2600 km of fast drifting between Australia and Antarctica on a N-S azimuth.