Abstract: The nappe structure in southern margin of Jiuquan basin is a key area that needs to break- through for further petroleum exploration in Yumen oilfield. This paper outlined the status of overthrust nappe structure for petroleum exploration and prevalent issues at home and abroad, presented special property of nappe structure in southern margin of Jiuquan basin and its oil and gas pool distributive patterns, and made suggestions for its further exploratory orientations and seismic fractural interpretation methods: ① to explore the nappe structure in frontal zone of western Jiuquan basin while exploring the inner and below it, that is, to find structure-complicated oil pool in Qingxi sag, dominated by Cretaceous-sourced reservoir while considering possibility of Carboniferous-Permian as source rocks; ② in source sag of eastern Jiuquan basin, exploration of self-source and self-reservoir oil and gas pool should be paid attention to; ③ to gain rational and proper structural interpretation by using various techniques such as remote sensing, field geology, regional geology, structural model developed with geophysical data, geology-seismic model developed with drilling and seismic data and equilibrium profile inversion as well as seismic forward modeling and etc.

Key words: Western Jiuquan basin, Eastern Jiuquan basin, nappe structure, oil and gas exploration