[2] The Alice Springs orogeny was centred in an area that had previously been a marine sedimentary basin, and involved the thrusting up of the underlying metamorphic and igneous rocks of Proterozoic age.
The Alice Springs Orogeny had its beginnings in the Late Ordovician, continuing during the Silurian and Devonian, and by the Carboniferous the folding of the sedimentary deposits of the central Australian basins had produced the mountainous terrain of the MacDonnell Ranges area.
The correspondence between the distribution of basement fault reactivation and subsidence patterns during the Petermann and Alice Springs Orogenies implies a link between relatively thick sedimentation and long-term lithospheric weakening.
[5] Since both events involved significant north-south shortening, deformation is said to have occurred in response to a similarly oriented in-plane regional stress field.
Deformation was not spatially continuous throughout the Alice Springs Orogeny, but focused at a number of discrete loci, situated along the current structural margins of the preserved basins and in areas of now-exhumed basement.
[6] Although shortening associated with the Alice Springs Orogeny was widespread, there are two major regions affected by significant basement involved deformation: the Redbank Shear Zone and the Officer Basin.
The spectacular Macdonnell Ranges near Alice Springs are made up of Amadeus Basin sediments tilted as a consequence of exhumation associated with the Redbank Shear Zone.