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The Lord Howe Rise: new views of enigmatic continental ribbon breakup from multi-channel seismic reflection data

Created 16/10/2025

Updated 16/10/2025

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The Lord Howe Rise is a continental ribbon that rifted from eastern Gondwana during the Late Cretaceous. The processes that lead to this breakup are still not fully understood, but span from slab rollback associated with back-arc extension to a plume impinging on the lithosphere. To better understand these rifting processes, a multi-leg geophysical cruise took place March¿May 2016 onboard R/V Kairei, collecting regional and high resolution multi-channel reflection and wide-angle refraction data, multibeam bathymetry, gravity, and magnetics. This study focuses on a regional ~900 km long east-west oriented profile at 27.2°S using the bathymetry and the multi-channel seismic reflection datasets. We present time and depth migrated reflection images and interpretations to address the structure and evolution of the eastern Australian margin. This seismic profile produced a clear image of the acoustic basement and overlying sedimentary strata from the Tasman Basin in the west to the Lord Howe Platform in the east. The Tasman Basin strata are tilted at depth by small-offset normal faults that do not propagate to the seafloor. These strata onlap onto the steep western edge of the Dampier Ridge, a sediment-covered basement high that steeply rises more than 3 km above the seafloor of the Tasman Basin. The basement and strata of the ridge are more deformed than the strata in the Tasman Basin. Further east, a basement low allowed for the formation of the thick Middleton Basin. This basin is more deformed on its eastern margin where the seafloor shallows onto the Lord Howe Rise. On the Lord Howe Rise itself, syn-rift and post-rift sedimentary sequences in the Capel and Faust basins document the breakup of the margin. The seismic profile ends on the eastern flank of the Lord Howe Platform, which is both the basement and seafloor regional high. The geophysical data presented here provide new constraints for reconstructing the evolution of the eastern Australian margin. Abstract submitted & presented at the 2016 American Geohpysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting (https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm16/meetingapp.cgi/)

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Field Value
Title The Lord Howe Rise: new views of enigmatic continental ribbon breakup from multi-channel seismic reflection data
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/en/dataset/9630cc75-46e3-4bfd-a8a8-ced5244f2d64
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
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Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "The Lord Howe Rise: new views of enigmatic continental ribbon breakup from multi-channel seismic reflection data". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/the-lord-howe-rise-new-views-of-enigmatic-continental-ribbon-breakup-from-multi-channel-seismic