The Pinnacles (Gulf of Mexico) lawmakers, fishermen and the oil industry. The Pinnacles (Gulf of Mexico) The Pinnacles is a rocky prominence on the Continental Shelf approximately 300 feet deep and located about 70 miles off the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama which contains a wide-ranging reef formation. The Pinnacles reefs consist of a lush fauna of hard, soft and, black corals, fixed sea lilies and sponges. The reef creates a living habitat for a well-developed and diverse fish culture. Snappers and groupers spawn here. Typical Caribbean reef fishes and Carolinian shelf fishes, along with epipelagic fishes, and a few deep-sea fishes populate the reef.
Gulf of Mexico basin 20 kilometers. Beneath the sediments of the Gulf of Mexico basin, most of the pre-Triassic basement rocks are believed to be allochthonous thrust sheets sutured during the formation of Pangaea. However, it was during the break-up of the supercontinent that the foundation for the Gulf of Mexico sediments would be lain. Prior to the rifting which formed the Gulf of Mexico basin, extensional deformation in the Late-Triassic caused by the breakup up of Pangaea, and more specifically the rifting of the Atlantic Ocean, created basement graben formations which filled with terrestrial red bed sediments, and volcanic sediments from the eruption