The Deep Basin lies along the western edge of the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin and east of the thrust belt in Alberta, Canada. The northern end of the Deep Basin abuts the Peace River Arch, a feature with a history of significant structural movements dating to at least the Devonian. Previous work either ignored structure in the Deep Basin or suggested that it did not exist.

Varying stress regimes have influenced the basin. Rocks older than Triassic were deposited in a passive margin setting where tensional stresses created horsts and grabens with offsets of hundreds to thousands of feet. During the Jurassic, as British Columbia was the site of terrane accretion, compression caused an initiation of thrusting and foreland basin formation to the east. The initial foreland basin structures were small in size compared to underlying structures. After cessation of thrusting, the area reverted to tensional deformation caused by extensive isostatic uplift and erosion. The strike of formations throughout the section progressively rotate counterclockwise to the southeast as the formations become younger. At the same time, the dips also become shallower.

A mosaic of low relief structures approximately 15 to 25 townships across are found throughout the foreland basin sequence. A comparison of these structures finds that they repeat through thousands of feet as a result of nearly vertical faults with small offsets. Portions of these mosaic blocks can be traced downward into the Triassic.

The Deep Basin provides an opportunity for a new type of subsurface analysis, one in which a set of formation tops from an array of wells can be simultaneously analyzed to provide rapid quantitative insights on basin development. The structural configuration of each formation can be unmixed and defined in terms of relative proportions of a small number of "end member" structural states. The relative proportion of each end member as a function of time is a succinct quantitative form of basin history analysis. The end members can be displayed as structure contour maps; they can also be decomposed into trends and residuals, providing additional details about the structural history of the basin.