From north to south, the principal rivers in the study area are Soto La Marina, Panuco, Tuxpan, Cazones, Tecolutla, and Nautla. The Panuco and Tuxpan rivers have built Holocene wave-dominated deltas that reflect local, relatively large fluvial input and subsequent marine transport and modification by longshore currents and waves. Also, local sand-rich facies along the coast and older beach ridges at Cabo Rojo (a prominent coastal feature south of the Panuco river that is largely controlled by the Cretaceous shelf margin) are examples of marine reworking of modern and relict sediments, respectively.The offshore upper Miocene-Pliocene-age depocenters are inferred from regional trends on isochron maps. They are as much as 43.5 mi (70 km) long and 0.6-12.4 mi (1-20 km) wide and largely reflect growth-fault control of lowstand progradational wedges. They contain discrete thickness maxima as much as 25 km long and 0.6-12.4 mi (1-20 km) wide that locally extend bas-inward as thinner intervals interpreted as lowstand deposits downdip from these depocenters.

Neogene depocenters shifted through time and exist today largely as clusters downdip of modern fluvial axes. This suggests that they contain lowstand deposits of ancestral, shifting fluvial networks, reworked by marine processes.