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Earth and Space Sciences · Glossary

What is Intracratonic, rift and passive-margin basins?

Also known as: intracratonic basin · rift basin · passive-margin basin

Definition 16.1 University Earth and Space Sciences — Year 2 · Chapter 16 — Sedimentary Basins Compared

An intracratonic basin is a broad, round or oval basin in the interior of a continent, far from plate boundaries, that subsides slowly over very long times without major faulting. A rift basin is a basin bounded by normal faults in a continental lithosphere being stretched; its subsidence follows the stretching and then the cooling of the lithosphere. A passive-margin basin is the wedge of sediment, thickening oceanwards, that accumulates on a continental margin after break-up, over the thinned crust of the old rift.

Four families of basins in schematic sections across the lithosphere (not to scale; sediment in yellow, continental crust in orange, oceanic crust in grey). The vertical exaggeration is large: real basins are hundreds of kilometres wide and a few to fifteen kilometres deep.
Four families of basins in schematic sections across the lithosphere (not to scale; sediment in yellow, continental crust in orange, oceanic crust in grey). The vertical exaggeration is large: real basins are hundreds of kilometres wide and a few to fifteen kilometres deep.
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