The Deepwater Horizon oil spill accident (variously referred to as the BP oil spill/disaster or the Macondo blowout) commenced on April 20th, 2010 on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect drilling platform. The ensuing fire aboard the drilling platform claimed eleven lives. Following the explosion and sinking of the fl oating oil rig, a sea-fl oor oil gusher fl owed for 87 days, until it was capped on July 15th, 2010. Th e total discharge has been estimated at 4.9 million barrels (780,000 m3), and the event was considered by some authorities to be the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. 

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) platform drilling the Macondo well in Mississippi Canyon Block 252 exploded, killing 11 workers and injuring another 17. The DWH oil spill resulted in nearly 5 million barrels (approximately 200 million gallons) of crude oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico (GoM). The full impacts of the spill on the GoM and the people who live and work there are unknown but expected to be considerable, and will be expressed over years to decades.

Just over 50 years ago, a group of prominent marine scientists of their day agreed to begin work on a digest of existing knowledge on the Gulf of Mexico. The eff ort was proposed by Lionel A. Walford of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Waldo L. Schmitt of the U.S. National Museum of Natural History, during a meeting of the Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute in Miami. Paul S.

Progradation of Atchafalaya Delta, one of the most dynamic geological events of the century, has produced a sizable new sand body on the Louisiana coast. Evolution of depositional environments in Atchafalaya Bay has been determined from analysis of sediment cores and bathymetric surveys. Use of X-ray radiography has made possible recognition of a number of subenvironments within major environments. Atchafalaya Delta exhibits all the sedimentary environments recorded in earlier Mississippi delta lobes. However, excellent stratigraphic control and current knowledge of the processes of deposition in Atchafalaya Bay make it possible to better link process-response in this than in other Mississippi subdeltas. In contrast to the modem Mississippi subdelta, the Atchafalaya should prograde more rapidly, form thinner sand bodies, and eventually cover a wider area, much like the Lafourche, St. Bernard, and Teche delta lobes. <...>

The Geology of North America series has been prepared to mark the Centennial of The Geological Society of America. It represents the cooperative efforts of more than 1,000 individuals from academia, state and federal agencies of many countries, and industry to prepare syntheses that are as current and authoritative as possible about the geology of the North American continent and adjacent oceanic regions.

The petroleum geology of Mexico remains relatively unknown to the international geoscience community because of the limited number of articles published in international forums by geoscientists from Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) and the Mexican Petroleum Institute. Sensitive Pemex data have traditionally been treated with strict confidentiality.