Cenozoic infilling of the northern Gulf of Mexico Basin with siliciclastic sediments occurred in a broadly offlapping pattern as successively younger shelf margins prograded basinward. Ancient shelf margins divide the basin profile into shelf and slope realms, with each realm containing economically important sandy reservoir units of fundamentally different geometries and stratal architecture. In the northern Gulf of Mexico, salt tectonics, related growth faulting, and shale compaction severely hinder recognition of ancient shelf margins on dip-oriented seismic sections, often making prediction of potential reservoir sand distributions problematical.

We demonstrate that biostratigraphic signals derived from the quantitative analysis of benthic foraminifera...