Foreword: Revisiting Lake Eyre Basin landscapes

Jan-Hendrik May, Trevor H. Worthy

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Sitting at the heart of the Australian continent, the modern drainage system termed the Lake Eyre Basin (LEB) has always occupied a special place in the geography of Australia. With its ~1.2 million km2 catchment area, and currently draining one-fifth of the continent, it is the fourth largest internally draining basin in the world. Much like its global counterparts in Africa (e.g. Chad Basin), or Asia (Caspian Basin), the Lake Eyre Basin is a wide and relatively shallow intra-cratonic basin with a long history of slow tectonic warping and subsidence. Succeeding an earlier Mesozoic basin that existed in Central Australia, an internally draining sedimentary depositional centre existed through much of the Cenozoic. This resulted in the geological structure termed the Lake Eyre Basin whose extent is primarily subsurface and is represented by a series of sedimentary formations, notably, the Palaeocene–Eocene Eyre Formation, the late Oligocene–Pliocene Namba and Etadunna formations, and the Pliocene–Quaternary Wipajiri, Tirari and Kutjitara formations, and their lateral equivalents (see, Callen et al., 1995). These geological structures of the Lake Eyre Basin document an eventful and climatically variable history in the Cenozoic, accompanied by a general drying trend that led into the arid to semi-arid environmental conditions that dominate much of the continent’s interior today (e.g. Martin, 2006; McGowran & Hill, 2015)...
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-6
Number of pages6
JournalTransactions of the Royal Society of South Australia
Volume146
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Keywords

  • Lake Eyre Basin (LEB)
  • intra-cratonic basin
  • geological structure

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