Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

Mt Lofty Ranges        see Tectonic landforms see Earthquakes

Work in the Mt Lofty Ranges, southern South Australia, provided the first evidence suggesting that Australian landscapes are not necessarily youthful (Hossfeld, 1926; Miles, 1952; Campana, 1958a).

White²

These ranges are defined by faults that are still active, the movements of which trigger earthquakes and tremors, making Adelaide the most earthquake prone capital city in Australia.

The faults of the Mt Lofty Ranges were active in the Late Cretaceous and earliest Tertiary. Eocene marine deposits were laid down in the Gulf of St Vincent that had downfaulted. The ranges formed at this time. Some believe that when the Eocene Torrens River left the upland it entered a lake that had formed in the fault angle depression between the Eden Fault and the backslope of the Para Block. The sediment load of the Torrens was then dropped in the lake as the water slowed. Fossils have been found in lake bed strata that date the deposits of the ancestral Torrens to the Eocene, about 60 Ma.

Sources & Further reading

1. Twidale, C.R., 2007, Ancient Australian Landscapes, Rosenberg Publishing Pty. Ltd. , NSW
2. Mary E White, After the Greening, The Browning of Australia, Kangaroo Press, 1994

Ranges