Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

Canning Basin

The Canning Basin covers an area of 595,000 km² in north-western Western Australia. It was uplifted at the end of the Cretaceous, dev eloping a river system of its own, that drained to the northwest.

In the Gregory sub-basin, the deepest depocentre, there is an accumulation of sediment about 18 km. To the north, the onshore section of the basin is bounded by the Kimberley Block, to the south by the Pilbara and Musgrave Blocks. To the east it is separated from the adjacent Amadeus Basin by an arch of Upper Proterozoic Sediments  To the south-east it is separated from another adjacent basin, the Officer Basin, by the Warri Arch, a belt of shallow basement rocks.

About 1/3 of the basin lies offshore, up to 1000 m below the surface. The Loveque Shelf separates it from the Browse Basin to the north, and in the south from the Carnarvon Basin by the Pilbara Shelf, the North Turtle Arch and the fault north of the arch.

Sources & Further reading

Mary E White, Running Down, Water in a Changing Land, Kangaroo Press, 2000

• Hydrology
• Bass Basin
• Bremer Basin
• Canning Basin
• Carnarvon Basin
• Carpentaria Basin
• Duntroon Basin
• Drainage Patterns
• Eromanga Basin
• Eromanga Sea
• Eucla Basin
• Great Artesian Basin-GAB
• Murray-Darling Basin
• Officer Basin
• Otway Basin
• Perth Basin
• Torquay Basin