The birth of modern Australia: Flowering plants, mammals and deserts

Robert Henderson; David Johnson

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139923866.011

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9 - The birth of modern Australia: Flowering plants, mammals and deserts

Robert Henderson and

David Johnson

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Robert Henderson: Affiliation:
James Cook University, North Queensland

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Summary

Australia was no longer part of the Pangean supercontinent, and its margin became a shallow shelf, formed by sediment shed from the inland mountains and by volcanoes along the rifts where Gondwana had broken into its modern fragments. From the mid Cretaceous, two major, unrelated changes shaped Australia on its trajectory to the present: a complete reorganisation of the plate tectonic setting of the continent and a worldwide extinction event, the consequences of which reshaped life on land as well as in the sea. In combination, these two changes utterly altered the aspect of Australia.

AUSTRALIA EMERGES

What caused Australia's plate tectonic patterns to change is uncertain. It involved the deep Earth, perhaps related to the particular configuration of the lithosphere in the supercontinent above, with instability followed by a change in circulation of the asthenosphere below. Separation from India in the early Cretaceous (at about 130 Ma) was followed – commencing in the mid Cretaceous (at about 85 Ma) – by separation from Antarctica and development of the Southern Ocean (see Figure 9.1). The Tasman Sea also began to open at about 85 Ma, but by the mid Paleocene (44 Ma ago), seafloor spreading responsible for its formation ceased, and Australia then became part of a lithosphere plate which includes an extensive tract of seafloor to the east. For the first time in over 400 Ma the eastern margin of Australia was very distant from an eastern convergent plate boundary, now relocated 3000 km out in the Pacific Ocean.

During the Tasman Sea opening, a substantial rim of crust that had once been part of the continent was peeled away, transported eastwards and submerged. This segment, of which the Lord Howe Rise is a substantial part, had a profound influence on the preceding, early Cretaceous development of the continent as a sediment source to the Great Artesian Basin. Although the part lost was volcanic upland, breakup on the east was accompanied by uplift along what is now the eastern Australian continental margin.

Because of the new lithosphere plate architecture, the convergent plate boundary that had been close to the eastern continental margin for so long ceased to be an influence. This meant an end to magmatic arc activity and to compressional stresses causing orogeny and mountain building.

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Geology of Australia , pp. 195 - 220

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139923866.011 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2016

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