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Ancient Australia

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Abstract

Remnants of ancient landscapes (mostly plains but including many residual hills and ranges) are widely preserved in the Australian landscape. Dated by stratigraphic means, and by their relationships with duricrusted. surfaces and lava flows, they form an integral part of the Australian scenery of which, in fact they constitute about 20%. At least twice, evidently, the continent was essentially baselevelled: first during the middle Mesozoic and second in the early-middle Tertiary. Some of the old landsurfaces are of exhumed type and examples of such palaeoforms range in age from the late Pleistocene to the Archaean. Others are of etch type and though they were initiated at various periods during the more-or-less distant past, many have only recently been exposed. But some palaeoforms including some of considerable antiquity are of epigene type: they were formed subaerially and have been exposed to the elements since exposure. Such old surfaces, even where duricrusted, pose considerable problems for all of the conventional models of landscape evolution.

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    Twidale C. R. & Campbell E. M.

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Twidale, C.R., Campbell, E.M. Ancient Australia. GeoJournal 16, 339–354 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00214393

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