Recent discoveries offshore Tanzania and Mozambique highlight East Africa as an emerging world-class pet-roleum province. Oil and gas estimates for this province total 12.5 BBO and 250 TCFG (Brownfield et al., 2012) as yet undiscovered. Play-opening reservoir systems have been verified in Paleocene, Eocene, and at least two Oligocene deep-water submarine fan and intraslope channel complexes (Law, 2011). In deep-water Tanzania, there have been seven gas discoveries (of eight attempts) since 2010, with recent announcements putting total gas reserves in Tanzania at 24–26 TCFG. In neighboring Mozambique, 19 wells were completed by Anadarko and ENI in the Ruvuma Basin from 2009 to June 2012, only two of which were not announced as commercial discoveries. With the additional drilling, the increase of reported reserves now approaches or exceeds 100 TCFG. Evidence continues to mount that suggests the Late Cretaceous section contains deposits from similar depositional settings (Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation, 2003). There are also indications that the petroleum system may contain oil as well as the established gas.

Recent software developments (OpendTect SSIS) enable us to study the time attributes of seismic stratigraphic surfaces within a chronostratigraphic framework by means of Wheeler transformation of seismic data. Studying stratigraphic surfaces in the structural and the Wheeler domain enhances our understanding of time attributes of these surfaces. The maximum flooding surface marks the end of transgression and the onset of normal regression and is a highly isochronous event. The basal surface of forced regression corresponds to the seafloor at the onset of forced regression. This is a highly isochronous event that coincides with the start of erosion at the top of the high stand deposits and the formation of the subaerial unconformity. The subaerial unconformity is a highly diachronous event that starts at the onset of forced regression, when the basal surface of forced regression is formed and stops at the end of forced regression, which coincides with the correlative conformity. The correlative conformity corresponds with the end of forced regression and highly isochronous. The maximum regressive surface marks the end of normal regression and the onset of transgression. This surface is in our case moderately isochronous.

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