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 wherein thick Jurassic salts and evaporites could be deposited. These evaporites overlay a thick transitional crust, the local basement rock prior to rifting, and deposition of salts continued over the forming oceanic crust as rifting spread the sea floor throughout the Jurassic. It was during the Jurassic, approximately 140–160 million years ago, that the shape of the Gulf of Mexico as we know it was formed. The unique shape of the Gulf of Mexico, surrounded on all sides by continental crust, is the result of two different tectonic boundaries: an ocean-continent transform boundary, and a magmatic plume fueled seafloor spreading