“…The Banda Arc collision has been intensively studied (Bowin et al, 1980;Richardson , 1993 ), but interpretation has been hindered by uncertainties as to the origin of the Banda Sea, where water depths in excess of 5 km testify to the presence of oceanic crust in the North and South Banda basins but where high-standing ridges include continental material (Silver et al, 1985). It has been suggested that the sea is underlain by trapped Mesozoic crust (McCabe et al, 1993) but the magnetic anomaly matching on which this hypothesis is based is suspect because ofthe irregular shape ofthe oceanic area, and has not been supported dredging, which has recovered only Middle Miocene or younger rocks (Rehault et al , 1994). Since there is compelling evidence for Middle Miocene collision in the Sulawesi region, at the western margin of the sea (Bergman et al , 1996), a Banda Sea origin as a post-collisional collapse basin, on the Mediterranean model, seems more probable.…”