The Lost Sea That Split Australia In Two: The Larapintine Sea

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Long before the vast deserts and rugged ranges of central Australia came to define the continent’s heart, an immense inland sea known as the Larapintine Sea submerged much of the landscape. In this documentary, we explore the extraordinary history of the Larapintine Sea, a forgotten ocean that once split Australia in two during the Cambrian and Ordovician periods, over 500 million years ago. This inland seaway played a critical role in shaping Australia's sedimentary basins, ancient ecosystems, and groundwater resources that remain crucial to this day.

The Larapintine Sea extended across what is now the Amadeus Basin, the Georgina Basin, the Wiso Basin, and other interconnected marine platforms. Unlike the later Eromanga Sea, which formed around 100 million years ago and is widely associated with the creation of the Great Artesian Basin, the Larapintine Sea was part of an earlier and even more mysterious chapter of Earth's history. It flooded low-lying parts of the ancient North Australian Craton as global sea levels rose dramatically during the Cambrian Explosion, bringing tropical marine conditions deep into the interior of the supercontinent Gondwana.

This video takes you deep into Australia's geological past to uncover the story of how the Larapintine Sea formed. We explain the tectonic setting that allowed these vast shallow marine incursions, highlighting how global plate movements, superplume activity, and the passive margins of Gondwana created the conditions for continental flooding. We discuss the structure and development of key basins like the Amadeus, Georgina, Ngalia, Warburton, and Wiso Basins, and how these sedimentary traps captured the story of ancient marine transgressions.

Discover the incredible marine life that once thrived within the Larapintine Sea. Trilobites with ornate exoskeletons scurried across the seafloor, early bivalve mollusks and gastropods filtered nutrients from warm, sunlit waters, and some of Earth's earliest jawless fish, including the famous Arandaspis prionotolepis, swam through the shallows. Graptolites, floating colonial organisms, drifted in the open water, leaving behind delicate fossil traces that today help geologists reconstruct the ancient seascape. This rich fossil heritage offers a rare window into early Paleozoic marine ecosystems, preserved across central and northern Australia.

We also explore how the Larapintine Sea eventually receded as global climates cooled and tectonic forces reconfigured the landscape. The Alice Springs Orogeny, a powerful mountain-building event, uplifted and folded the basins that once lay beneath the inland sea, fragmenting the Centralian Superbasin and reshaping the interior of Australia. As the sea withdrew, it left behind vast sequences of marine limestone, sandstone, and shale that today form some of Australia's most important aquifers, such as the Mereenie Sandstone, Pacoota Sandstone, and the Cambrian Limestone Aquifer in the Georgina and Wiso Basins.

Link to video on the Eromanga Sea:


Link to video on the Great Artesian Basin:


Studies & Reports Used To Construct This Video:
VOLUME OF GROUNDWATER STORED IN THE MEREENIE AQUIFER SYSTEM In the Pine Gap / Roe Creek to Rocky Hill / Ooraminna Region:


Ichnofacies of the Stairway Sandstone fish-fossil beds (Middle Ordovician, Northern Territory, Australia):


Early Ordovician conodonts from far western New South Wales, Australia:
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History of the Ordovician continental platform shelf margin of Australia:


Contrasting depositional histories, detrital zircon provenance and hydrocarbon systems: Did the Larapintine Seaway link the Canning and Amadeus Basins during the Ordovician?:


Ichnofacies of the Stairway Sandstone fish-fossil beds (Middle Ordovician, Northern Territory, Australia):


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