The continental margin off the southeastern United States is underlain by two major basins, the Carolina trough off North Carolina and South Carolina and the Blake Plateau Basin off Florida and Georgia, with the latter basin's landward extension, the Southeast Georgia embayment. The embayment, beneath the continental shelf is the only area in which drilling has taken place. Strata of the landward part of the Blake Plateau Basin including the embayment form a wedge of onlapping marine

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deposits that might provide stratigraphic traps, such as pinch-outs, barrier islands, and channels. Drapes over basement highs might trap petroleum. The seaward part of the Blake Plateau Basin contains a thick (14 km), landward-dipping section, probably composed mainly of carbonate platform deposits. Carbonate banks and an Albian-Aptian rudist reef might provide traps, although the seaward part of the platform has been breached by erosion.

In the Carolina trough, flow of Jurassic(?) salt has formed diapirs, and withdrawal of salt has caused a large growth fault complex to form along the landward side of the trough. Because the block of sedimentary rock (12 km thick) above the salt is subsiding almost vertically, structures at the fault may include compressional features. The diapirs and faults may provide traps. A large shelf-edge anticline exists more than 150 km long and with a closure of as much as 500 m. Other possible traps might result from stratigraphic features of the onlapping sedimentary wedge landward of the Carolina trough and the eroded and buried paleoslope on the seaward side of the trough.

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