Gulf of Mexico BP reached an $18.7bn settlement with the US government, the states of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, as well as 400 local authorities. To date BP's cost for the clean-up, environmental and economic damages and penalties has reached $54bn. According to the National Response Center, the oil industry has thousands of minor accidents in the Gulf of Mexico every year. On May 12, 2016, a release of oil from subsea infrastructure on Shell's "Brutus" oil rig released 2,100 barrels of oil. This leak created a visible 2 mile by 13 mile oil slick in the sea about 97 miles
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