ABSTRACT

The history of the Gulf of Mexico was initiated close to the Paleozoic-Mesozoic time boundary, when the North American continent began to move northward from an equatorial location. This pole-ward drift is indicated by paleomagnetic, seismic, gravity, volcanic and a large variety of structural evidence. The Gulf of Mexico appeared as a first-order sag, or subsidence, basin in a well developed north-south tensional stress field. Similar basins are known in other parts of the world.

Northward motion of the continent is responsible, at least in good part, for a number of consequences: the chilling that has led to late Cenozoic glaciation, the development and integration of the Mississippi-Missouri river system, the location and thickness of the Gulf Coast geosyncline, the initiation and termination of evaporite deposition in the basin, the distribution of clastics and carbonates within the basin, and others.

The second-and higher-order effects are probably so numerous and complicated that it may never be possible to explain them all and to tie them together properly. However, more of them now fit together than ever before. The history produced by the conceptual model, and supported by many observations which were not originally sought

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as evidence, also provides suggestions for solutions to certain other problems: for example, the missing southern "end" of the Appalachian Mountains is probably located in Mexico or Guatemala.

The conceptual model leads to certain generalizations about structural and stratigraphic traps, but geological variability in four dimensions is so great that details cannot be predicted, and in many instances even valid generalizations will not hold.

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