The sedimentary and structural development in the Late Jurassic-Early Cretaceous period in the Netherlands is largely governed by the Late Cimmerian rift phase and the subsequent post-rift. The rifting affected the Dutch Central Graben in the northern offshore first. East-west extension during the Callovian and Oxfordian activated the faults and salt structures that bordered the existing Triassic graben structure and created accommodation space. The basin was filled with siliciclastic non-marine and marginal marine sediments, interrupted by thick and basin-wide coal seams at the Callovian Oxfordian boundary. In the Kimmeridgian, the extension regime changed to NE-SW and provoked the reactivation of Paleozoic NW trending faults in the subsurface of the Netherlands. As a result, accommodation space was created in several other basins and thick stacks of sediments accumulated in the hanging walls of these faults. This continued throughout the latest Jurassic until the earliest Cretaceous when movement along the faults slowed down or stalled and footwall erosion occurred in many places. During the ensuing post-rift thermal sag phase, deposition extended outside the basins onto the bordering platforms but the basins remained the most active depocentres accumulating hundreds of metres of sediment up until the Aptian. In the Aptian and Albian, the formerly prevailing siliciclastic depositional systems were gradually replaced by carbonate-dominated systems. By that time, the vast majority of the Netherlands had become fully marine.