Geology of the Northwest African Continental Margin

The Northwest African and the conjugate Northeast American continental margins provide excellent examples of mature passive continental margins which record in their thick sediment cover the birth and evolution of the Atlantic Ocean Basins during the past 200 million years. Due to a dense net of single- and multichannel seismic reflection lines, numerous Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) sites and petroleum exploration wells, and
the well-known onshore geology, the Northwest African margin is one of the bes"t-documen ted margins of the world. A particular advantage of this margin is that its coastal basins are well exposed and accessible for detailed stratigraphic studies and onshore-offshore correlations, whereas the Mesozoic-Cenozoic marginal basins off eastern North America underlie only
the present continental shelf and slope.