Introduction to this special section: Regional focus: Gulf of Mexico

Since the first offshore well was drilled there in 1938, the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) has been one of the world's most exciting and prolific oil-producing basins. Evolving seismic and production technology has kept it an active and vibrant basin for almost a century. The original offshore seismic used short streamers and dynamite sources; these evolved to ever-longer streamers, greater numbers of channels, and much more environmentally sensitive air guns to acquire huge amounts of 2D data. The Miocene trends closer to shore were largely developed with this, and bright spot technology in the 1960s and 1970s guided and allowed the rapid development of the prolific Plio-Pleistocene gas fields near the edge of the shelf.