Gulf of Mexico 1979, the "Ixtoc I" oil platform in the Bay of Campeche suffered a blowout leading to a catastrophic explosion, which resulted in a massive oil spill that continued for nine months before the well was finally capped. This was ranked as the largest oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico until the "Deepwater Horizon" oil spill in 2010. On April 20, 2010, the "Deepwater Horizon" oil platform, located in the Mississippi Canyon about off the Louisiana coast, suffered a catastrophic explosion; it sank a day-and-a-half later. It was in the process of being sealed with cement for temporary abandonment, to
Gulf of Mexico basin boundaries weakened by the loading of sediments in the Gulf. As mentioned above, the pre-rift stratigraphy of the central Gulf of Mexico basin, which now lies beneath nearly 20 kilometers of sediment deposited during the Jurassic through the Holocene, is made up primarily of extensional graben formations filled with "red beds," basalt flows, and diabase dikes and sills deposited and intruded during the break-up of Pangaea and the explosion of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Plume. Red beds, also referred to as non-marine clastic sequences, which are often red in color, have been found in wells drilled in the Gulf of