Australia's Forgotten Explosive Volcanoes

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#supervolcano #volcano #australia
Australia today is often seen as a geologically stable, ancient continent—but hidden within its deep-time history lies a turbulent and explosive past that few people know about. In this video, we take you back hundreds of millions of years to a time when massive stratovolcanoes towered over eastern Australia and caldera-forming supereruptions rocked the landscape. This is the forgotten era of Australia’s volcanic arc, when tectonic fury shaped the land and helped build the eastern half of the continent as we know it.

Our journey centers around the New England Orogen, one of the most complex and geologically significant regions in Australia. Active from the Devonian through to the Triassic period (approximately 419 to 201 million years ago), this orogenic belt was formed by long-lived subduction along Gondwana’s eastern margin. As oceanic plates plunged beneath the continent, magma rose to the surface, giving birth to a chain of powerful stratovolcanoes—volcanoes with steep flanks, explosive eruptions, and deadly pyroclastic flows. These volcanoes would have resembled today’s Mount Fuji or Mount St. Helens, and they formed in an arc similar to the modern-day Pacific Ring of Fire.

We explore how these stratovolcanoes dominated the east coast of what would become Australia, producing vast quantities of andesitic to rhyolitic magma. Thick sequences of volcanic rock—breccias, tuffs, ignimbrites, and lava flows—tell the story of repeated eruptions. Deep within the crust, intrusive magmas cooled to form the granites of the New England Batholith, which later became hosts to rich mineral deposits including gold, tin, antimony, copper, and tungsten. Regions like Hillgrove, Emmaville, and the Tamworth Belt are now known not only for their mining history but for their links to ancient volcanic activity. We highlight how some eruptions in the Tamworth Belt were so massive they resulted in caldera collapses, comparable in scale to what we call supervolcanoes today.

This video also explains why the stratovolcano era came to an end. The Hunter–Bowen Orogeny, a major mountain-building event during the Late Permian to Triassic, marked the final stages of active subduction in Australia. As oceanic plates collided, terranes like the Gympie Terrane accreted onto the continent, eventually choking off the subduction zone. Slab rollback and tectonic compression shut down the volcanic arc system, and with it, Australia’s last stratovolcanoes became extinct. The continent transitioned from an active margin to a passive one, entering a long period of volcanic quiet.

But volcanism in Australia didn’t disappear entirely. Millions of years later, intraplate hotspot volcanism emerged—most famously seen in the Newer Volcanics Province of western Victoria and southeastern South Australia. While these more recent eruptions have occurred as recently as 5,000 years ago, they are fundamentally different from the stratovolcanoes of the Paleozoic and Mesozoic. Instead of steep cones and explosive ash columns, these modern volcanoes produce low-profile scoria cones, maars, and broad basalt lava flows. The difference in magma chemistry, eruption style, and tectonic setting is profound—and we explore exactly why that matters.

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OzGeology is an Australian-based YouTube channel that specializes in creating high-quality documentaries on Earth sciences and natural disasters. The content is designed to be easy to digest and covers a wide range of topics, not only focusing on geology but occasionally exploring other scientific areas as well.