Publication Name: PESA's Eastern Australasian Basin Symposium II
Authors: C.A. Foss, Z.S. Shi, J. Teasdale, L.L. Pryer, T.S. Loutit, P.G. Stuart-Smith and K. Romine
Date Published: December 2004
Number of Pages: 25
Reference Type: Book Section
Abstract:
The aeromagnetic coverage over the Officer Basin has been used to map basement terranes and depth to basement beneath the basin. The fundamental ambiguities of non-uniqueness in magnetic field interpretation have been minimized by using geological source models and applying those models selectively to only the most appropriate anomalies. This sparse but high quality set of basement depth estimates has been integrated with a structural model of the basin history. The structural model is a prediction of the basin development according to the response of the underlying basement to regional stress regimes associated with its global tectonic setting. Because there are so few alternative constraints on basement depth, the reliability of the magnetic depth estimates has been investigated by testing the depth estimation methods on upward continuations of the magnetic field over the near-surface Musgrave Block to the north of the basin. The results of the experiment confirm that these methods are able to resolve source depths to a precision consistent with the fundamental limitations of the data. This integrated structural and geophysical study of the Officer Basin has providedan extrapolation of the very sparse seismic and well data to provide an image of the basin which cannot be achieved from any of the other available data sets.