Regional geology forms an essential bridge between local and continental/global geology. Its purpose should be to simplify local surface and subsurface data to a scale that aids prediction and further illuminates the broader brush generalisations implicit in continent-wide and global syntheses.

The most important question every geoscientist should continually ask is ‘why’? Why do I see what I see? Too often it is accepted, for example, that a sedimentary basin ‘is there’, and geoscientists continue to work on surfaces and units within its boundaries, without ever questioning ‘why do I have this hole in the ground’? Why is it here? What governed its geometry and stratigraphic architecture? What controlled the sediment entry points? What dictates the thermal structure? In resource evaluation and field development, the focus is commonly further narrowed, with management only requesting a map on a ‘Green Horizon’ picked on seismic data in a workstation environment covering only a small segment of the total basin area; insights from the broader regional and mega-regional geological understanding are lost. <...>