Cretaceous Sedimentary Rocks of Eastern Australia, 1.5 Million km²

Little deformed Cretaceous sedimentary rocks underlie 1,500,000 km² of eastern Australia, spanning approximately 20 million years. The dataset, published by the Australian Ocean Data Network, describes depositional environments ranging from freshwater to shallow marine, with sediment thicknesses up to 2000 meters preserved. It was last updated on 2026-04-10.

Use Cases

• Modeling ancient epicontinental sea environments based on described depositional sequences.
• Analyzing sediment provenance shifts from quartz-rich to quartz-poor sequences.
• Studying transgressive-regressive cycles over a 20-million-year period.
• Comparing depositional models using the described analogy to the modern Baltic Sea.

Strengths

• Covers a vast geographic area of 1,500,000 km² in eastern Australia.
• Describes sediment thickness up to 2000 meters in the Eromanga Basin.
• Provides a detailed temporal model spanning about 20 million years of the Cretaceous period.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data is provided as PDF/HTML documents, not in a structured, machine-readable format.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network via data_gov_au.

Collection Method

Likely compiled from geological surveys and research.

Time Range

Cretaceous period, covering approximately 20 million years.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-10 17:30:18.714218; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Eromanga and Surat Basins in eastern Australia.