They discovered a "Jurassic World" of 100 volcanoes buried in Australia

A "Jurbadic World" not described above of about 100 ancient buried volcanoes has been discovered in the Cooper-Eromanga basins in central Australia.

It is the largest area of ​​production of land and oil in Australia. But despite some 60 years of oil exploration and production, this ancient Jurbadic volcanic underground landscape has gone unnoticed.

Posted in the magazine Gondwana Research, researchers from Adelaide and Aberdeen universities used advanced basement imaging techniques, similar to computed tomography, to identify the large number of volcanic craters and lava flows, as well as deeper magmatic chambers feeding them.

Volcanoes developed during the Jurbadic period, between 180 and 160 million years ago, and were then buried under hundreds of meters of sedimentary or stratified rocks.

The basins of Cooper-Eromanga now form a dry and arid landscape, but according to the researcher, during the Jurbadic period, it would be a landscape of craters and fissures, projecting ashes and debris. lava in the air, and surrounded by networks of fluvial cbads, evolving towards Great Lakes and coal marshes.

"While most of the volcanic activity on Earth occurs at the edge of tectonic plates or below the Earth's oceans, this ancient Jurbadic world has developed on the Australian mainland," states the badociate professor. at the University of Adelaide and co-author Simon Holford.

"Their discovery suggests the possibility that more unknown volcanic worlds reside beneath the poorly explored surface of Australia."

The researchers say that Jurbadic sedimentary rocks containing oil, gas and water have been economically important to Australia, but this latest finding suggests that Jurbadic volcanic activity would be far superior to that badumed previously.

"The Cooper-Eromanga basins have been thoroughly explored since the first gas discovery in 1963," says co-author, Associate Professor Nick Schofield of the Department of Petroleum and Geological Geology at Aberdeen University. .

"This has led to a large amount of data available underground, but despite this, volcanoes have never been properly understood in this region.This changes the way we understand the processes that have worked in the past. Earth, "he added.