Arkell.1956.Jurassic..

SHIELDS, SHELVES, MOBILE BELTS 621
(Palaeo- and Meso-Australia in fig. 102). Some lacustrine continental
deposits occur as outliers on the western and northern parts of the shield,
but only those in the south-west are dated by plants as Jurassic. The
main outcrops of the Jurassic lacustrine beds are all in the east, where
most rest on the folded Palaeozoic shelf. Australia is therefore no
exception to the general rule that the major pre-Cambrian shields of the
earth were upstanding in the Jurassic and mainly the scene of erosion
rather than deposition.
FIG. 102.—Sketch-map to show the structural evolution of Australia. After
R. W. Fairbridge, 1950.
SHELVES
Surrounding the shields are usually more or less broad shelves ('aires
d'ennoyage' of Haug, 1900, 1910), which are neither shields nor true
mobile belts, but were covered or partly covered in the Jurassic by epeiric
seas, the deposits of which are varied, seldom very thick, and often highly
fossiliferous.
The shelves were described and defined with reference to Europe by
von Bubnoff (1931), who divided them into stable shelves and labile shelves.
The typical stable shelf is European Russia. Over enormous areas
horizontal, thin but palaeontologically almost complete Upper Jurassic
sediments spread transgressively over little-disturbed Palaeozoics. The
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