The Arafura Basin is located on the northern margin of Australia in the Arafura Sea and extends from the onshore Northern Territory to offshore northern Australia and beyond the Australian-Indonesian border, covering approximately 200,000 km2 in Australian territory.
The Arafura Basin formed in the Neoproterozoic as a result of NW-SE upper crustal extension producing a series of NE-SW trending half graben across much of the basin. During this time the dominantly clastic sediments of the Wessel Group were deposited. Subsequent periods of subsidence in the Cambro-Ordovician, Late Devonian and Late Carboniferous to Early Permian were separated by long, tectonically quiescent periods of non-deposition and erosion. The predominantly marine carbonates of the Cambro-Ordovician Goulburn Group are overlain by shallow marine to non-marine clastics and carbonates of the Devonian Arafura Group and fluvio-deltaic clastics of the Late Carboniferous to Early Permian Kulshill Group equivalent.
The Goulburn Graben formed in the Late Carboniferous to Early Permian in response to oblique extension associated with the break-up of Gondwana. Subsequent contraction in the Triassic resulted in oblique inversion of the Goulburn Graben, uplift and erosion of up to 3.5 km of sediment. The deformational event affected areas to the north and south of the Goulburn Graben to a lesser extent. Subsequent erosion resulted in formation of a peneplain across the basin upon which the sediments of the Money Shoal Basin were deposited.