Basement Influences on Structural Styles in the Bremer and Eyre Sub-Basins, Southern Australia

Abstract

The Bight Basin on the southern margin of Australia is nearly 2000 km wide from west to east and overlies a number of different basement terranes (Figure 1). Major basement terrane divisions occur between the basement of the Ceduna delta and the Eyre and Bremer sub-basins, resulting in changes in structural styles in the overlying basin successions.

The Eyre Sub-Basin overlies the boundaries of the Proterozoic Madura and Coompana basement provinces, which are separated by the Mundrabilla shear zone. The shear zone is a N-S trending, continent-wide structure visible in magnetic data which appears to extend offshore in the Eyre Sub-Basin and is also visible as a north-trending present-day fault scarp in the onshore Eucla Basin. Seismic data interpretation suggests that the shear zone steps to the east in the region of the Jerboa-1 well. Differential movement across the shear zone during Jurassic-Cretaceous rifting may have influenced the location of depocentres within the Eyre Sub-Basin.

Overlying the Albany Fraser Orogen’s northern foreland, the Bremer Sub-Basin is dominated by WSW-ENE trending half graben structures and large rollover anticlines associated with Jurassic-Cretaceous rifting. The basin is divided by a N-S trending basement structure, visible in gravity data, and in the overlying sedimentary succession as a broad zone of subsidence with several periods of reactivation. Similarities between this structure and the shear zone in the Eyre Sub-Basin suggest they may have a similar origin.