“…Lehner (1969) was probably the fi rst to illustrate synclinal minibasins sinking into thick salt masses on the Gulf of Mexico slope. Minibasins have since been described in the Aptian salt basins of Brazil (e.g., Demercian et al, 1993;Cobbold et al, 1995;Roberts et al, 2004) and West Africa (e.g., Duval et al, 1992;Marton et al, 2000;Hudec and Jackson, 2004), the Pricaspian Basin (e.g., Barde et al, 2002;Volozh et al, 2003;Ismail-Zadeh et al, 2004), Sverdrup Basin (Jackson and Harrison, 2006), Canadian Maritime basins (e.g., Balkwill and Legall, 1989;Shimeld, 2004), Zechstein salt basin (e.g., Stewart and Clark, 1999;Baldschuhn et al, 2001;Mohr et al, 2005), Flinders Ranges (e.g., Dyson, 1999;Rowan and Vendeville, 2006), Paradox Basin (Hudec and May, 1998;Prochnow et al, 2005Prochnow et al, , 2006Matthews et al, 2007), the Red Sea (Heaton et al, 1995), and in several Mesozoic salt basins of northwest Africa (e.g., Tari et al, 2003). However, minibasins are best known on the continental slope of the northern Gulf of Mexico, where they have subsided into thick allochthonous salt canopies (Fig.…”