Abstract

High-resolution 2D seismic data reveal presence of extremely dense normal extensional faults in the middle Oligocene to late Miocene section in the entire offshore Bass Basin. The very fine-grained Late Tertiary calcareous clay and marldominated succession of the basal Torquay Group exhibits a complex system of small-scale extensional faults with layerbound deformation without displacement transfer to the underlying basement structures. The entire sequence is pervasively deformed by very small-scale normal faults with average fault spacing ranging between 60m