Gulf Coast of the United States Pensacola, St. Petersburg, Tampa, and increasingly, Sarasota. All are the centers of their respective metropolitan areas and contain large ports. (Baton Rouge is relatively far from the Gulf of Mexico; its port is on the Mississippi River, as is the port of New Orleans.) The Gulf Coast is made of many inlets, bays, and lagoons. The coast is also intersected by numerous rivers, the largest of which is the Mississippi River. Much of the land along the Gulf Coast is, or was, marshland. Ringing the Gulf Coast is the Gulf Coastal Plain which reaches from Southern Texas to the western
Gulf of Mexico basin Mexico which penetrated the Late-Triassic and Early-Jurassic strata, filling the extensional graben features. The Gulf of Mexico basin red beds are specifically named the Eagle Mills formation, located directly beneath the salt, evaporite and marine sediments deposited during the Jurassic, and often found with the diabase dikes and basalt flows mentioned above. Basement rocks in the northeastern region of the Gulf of Mexico basin are fragments of the African plate which remained behind during the breakup of Pangaea and date back to the late Precambrian through the Cambrian. It is atop these Precambrian plate fragments that the mainly carbonate and