page_title: Kutai Basin
section_title: Plate tectonic setting
hierarchical_section_title: Kutai Basin / Plate tectonic setting
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Carte de la plaque de la Sonde English: Map of the Sunda Plate
context_page_description: The Kutai sedimentary basin extends from the central highlands of Borneo, across the eastern coast of the island and into the Makassar Strait. With an area of 60,000 km², and depths up to 15 km, the Kutai is the largest and deepest Tertiary age basin in Indonesia. Plate tectonic evolution in the Indonesian region of SE Asia has produced a diverse array of basins in the Cenozoic. The Kutai is an extensional basin in a general foreland setting. Its geologic evolution begins in the mid Eocene and involves phases of extension and rifting, thermal sag, and isostatic subsidence. Rapid, high volume, sedimentation related to uplift and inversion began in the Early Miocene. The different stages of Kutai basin evolution can be roughly correlated to regional and local tectonic events. It is also likely that regional climate, namely the onset of the equatorial ever wet monsoon in early Miocene, has affected the geologic evolution of Borneo and the Kutai basin through the present day. Basin fill is ongoing in the lower Kutai basin, as the modern Mahakam River delta progrades east across the continental shelf of Borneo.
context_section_description: The Cenozoic plate tectonics of the Indonesian region have generated a complex assemblage of micro-continental blocks and marginal ocean basins surrounded by extensional margins, subduction zones and major transcurrent faults. The island of Borneo and the Kutai basin are located on the Sunda micro-plate, which is bounded to the north and west by the Eurasian plate, to the south by the Indo-Australian plate and to the west by the Philippine and Pacific oceanic plates.  In the Cenozoic, the Indo-Australian plate has been moving north and subducting under Eurasia.  The collision of the Indian continent with Eurasia halted subduction and uplifted the Himalayas.  In between the continents of India and Australia, the oceanic crust is still subducting under the Sunda plate, forming the Sunda trench and Sunda Arc. Australia and Australian derived micro-plates collided with the Sunda plate and Pacific plate in the Pliocene, creating a complex of subduction zones and island arcs.  The Philippine plate has been obliquely subducting the Sunda plate for most of the Cenozoic.
  The complex interaction of the Sunda, Eurasian, Indo-Australian, Philippine and Pacific plates in the Cenozoic has controlled the evolution of approximately 60 Tertiary sedimentary basins in the Indonesian region.  Many of these basins, including the Kutai, have formed in a back arc extensional setting, driven by passive or active subduction rollback.  The mid Miocene episode of inversion in the Kutai can be linked to collision of continental fragments from the South China Sea with NW Borneo.  The Pliocene inversion episode is contemporaneous with the collision of Australia with the Banda arc, with structural connections provided by strike-slip fault systems through Sulawesi.
caption: Sunda Plate map-fr
exif: {}