The frontier region of New Guinea lies along the northern edge of the Australian continent, with the island having acted as a buffer zone between the Australian tectonic plate to the south and oceanic crust to the north since the Palaeozoic. This buffer zone has seen multiple periods of subduction, rifting, collision, and uplift that are recorded in the sedimentary fill and structural histories of its Mesozoic and Cenozoic basins (including the Salawati, Bintuni, Mamberamo, and Papuan basins). The Mesozoic and Cenozoic sedimentary fill of these basins have been derived from two vastly different settings. The Jurassic to Cretaceous reservoir rocks of the Bintuni Basin and Papuan Fold and Thrust Belt were deposited from the erosion of granitic mountain belts and recycled continental sediments formed during Permian to Jurassic subduction and subsequent rifting along Australia’s northern margin. In contrast, Cenozoic reservoir rocks were deposited in an entirely different tectonic setting, where widespread volcanic island collision and ophiolite obduction since the Paleogene has delivered vast amounts of mineralogically and texturally immature volcanic-derived sediment into the surrounding basins. Despite this, quartz-rich good quality reservoir rocks are found throughout the Cenozoic basins (such as in the Papuan Basin), largely driven by widespread felsic volcanism during collisional processes and the uplift of a Triassic granitic basement.

To better understand how this long-lived convergent margin and its changing tectonic regimes has impacted basin formation across New Guinea new palaeogeographic and tectonic reconstructions are presented here. These geology-driven reconstructions have been created based on newly available field observations, sedimentary provenance, and uplift histories. The new palaeogeographies highlight where and when quartz-rich basement rocks were uplifted to provide sediment into the basins, how far-field tectonic stresses led to basin opening and inversion events, the changing depositional environments present across the island, and how they responded to tectonics-driven relative sea level changes.