“…These platforms host numerous gas reservoirs (Jia, 1997), a fact that makes the understanding of the evolution of these carbonate systems critical for hydrocarbon exploration. Numerous previous studies about the overall Tarim carbonates focused on the stratigraphy and paleogeography (Zhao et al, 2010;Lin et al, 2011;Zhao et al, 2011;Chen et al, 2015), depositional architectures of platforms and platform evolution (Gao et al, 2006;Fan et al, 2007Fan et al, , 2008Gu et al, 2009;Wang et al, 2011a;Zhao et al, 2014;Gao and Fan, 2015;Ni et al, 2015;He et al, 2017), the growth mode and characteristics of reef buildups (Xiao et al, 1996;Liu et al, 2003;Gu et al, 2005;Bai et al, 2017aBai et al, , 2017b and controlling parameters, including tectonics, subsidence, eustasy, climate/temperature, salinity and nutrients supply (Zhang et al 2014;Zhao et al, 2014;Liu et al, 2016;He et al, 2017;Zhang, 2017). 20 seismic profiles and 13 selected wells were considered to further detail the evolution of the Cambrian and Ordovician carbonate successions in east-central Tarim Basin, in order to reconstruct the evolution of the depositional systems through time and facies distribution, as well as to identify the role of post-depositional tectonics on the present-day geometry recorded in the seismic profiles.…”