Approximately 2500 km of petroleum exploration and development drilling has been undertaken in the Cooper Basin region in South Australia, which is a linear coverage greater than the distance between Adelaide and Darwin. However, only 1.4% of this drilling has penetrated basement.

The term 'basement' here refers to all the pre- Permo-Carboniferous sediments and volcanic, granitic and metamorphic lithologies beneath the Cooper Basin. This includes Proterozoic metasediments, Cambrian to Ordovician Warburton Basin sediments and volcanics, and Carboniferous granite intrusives. Petroleum discoveries made in, and new geological insights gained into, the Warburton Basin over the past 20 years have increased the interest of earth scientists in the basin.

A significant amount of scientific data on it has been generated by several authors. This publication brings such data and related concepts together into the one atlas. The atlas also incorporates petroleum databases and a significant number of recent images compiled by PIRSA. New maps have been created to summarise, display and interpret all these data. Wherever possible, an even spacing of wells over the Cooper Basin region was chosen for this study. However, the concentration of drilling and distribution of lithologies often meant that this was not possible. Wherever possible, key wells were chosen to provide as many of the differing data sets as exist, to allow comparison and correlation. However, many of the cored wells are the oldest wells in the basin, whereas it is the more modern wells that have the better quality petrophysical logs. Two methods were needed to display the data in the atlas.

A GIS interface was used wherever possible to compile the report. Many images were compiled in PDF format, but the zip file contains the shape files for import into the readers GIS package.