The Caribbean Plate is a mostly oceanic tectonic plate underlying Central America and the Caribbean Sea off the northern coast of South America.
Roughly in area, the Caribbean Plate borders the North American Plate, the South American Plate, the Nazca Plate and the Cocos Plate. These borders are regions of intense seismic activity, including frequent earthquakes, occasional tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions.
The northern boundary with the North American Plate is a transform or strike-slip boundary that runs from the border area of Belize, Guatemala (Motagua Fault), and Honduras in Central America, eastward through the Cayman trough along the Swan Islands Transform Fault before joining the southern boundary of the Gonâve Microplate. East of the Mid-Cayman Rise this continues as the Walton fault zone and the Enriquillo–Plantain Garden fault zone into eastern Hispaniola. From there it continues into Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Part of the Puerto Rico Trench, the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean (roughly ), lies along this border. The Puerto Rico Trench is at a complex transition from the subduction boundary to the south and the transform boundary to the west.
The eastern boundary is a subduction zone, the Lesser Antilles subduction zone, where oceanic crust of the South American Plate is being subducted under the Caribbean Plate. Subduction forms the volcanic islands of the Lesser Antilles Volcanic Arc from the Virgin Islands in the north to the islands off the coast of Venezuela in the south. This boundary contains seventeen active volcanoes, most notably Soufriere Hills on Montserrat; Mount Pelée on Martinique; La Grande Soufrière on Guadeloupe; Soufrière Saint Vincent on Saint Vincent; and the submarine volcano Kick 'em Jenny which lies about 10 km north of Grenada. Large historical earthquakes in 1839 and 1843 in this region are possibly megathrust earthquakes.
Along the geologically complex southern boundary, the Caribbean Plate interacts with the South American Plate forming Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago (all on the Caribbean Plate), and islands off the coast of Venezuela (including the Leeward Antilles) and Colombia.
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The Isthmus of Panama (Istmo de Panamá), also historically known as the Isthmus of Darien (Istmo de Darién), is the narrow strip of land that lies between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, linking North and South America. It contains the country of Panama and the Panama Canal. Like many isthmuses, it is a location of great geopolitical and strategic importance. The isthmus is thought to have been finally formed around 3 million years ago (Ma), separating the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and causing the creation of the Gulf Stream, as first suggested in 1910 by Henry Fairfield Osborn.
The Caribbean (ˌkærᵻˈbiːən,_kəˈrɪbiən , ˈkærɪbiæn ; el Caribe; les Caraïbes; de Caraïben) is a subregion of the Americas that includes the Caribbean Sea and its islands, some of which are surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and some of which border both the Caribbean Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean; the nearby coastal areas on the mainland are often also included in the region. The region is southeast of the Gulf of Mexico and the North American mainland, east of Central America, and north of South America.
The Cocos Plate is a young oceanic tectonic plate beneath the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of Central America, named for Cocos Island, which rides upon it. The Cocos Plate was created approximately 23 million years ago when the Farallon Plate broke into two pieces, which also created the Nazca Plate. The Cocos Plate also broke into two pieces, creating the small Rivera Plate. The Cocos Plate is bounded by several different plates. To the northeast it is bounded by the North American Plate and the Caribbean Plate.
This course will provide the fundamental knowledge in neuroscience required to
understand how the brain is organised and how function at multiple scales is
integrated to give rise to cognition and beh
This course will provide the fundamental knowledge in neuroscience required to
understand how the brain is organised and how function at multiple scales is
integrated to give rise to cognition and beh
This course will provide the fundamental knowledge in neuroscience required to
understand how the brain is organised and how function at multiple scales is
integrated to give rise to cognition and beh
Explores the stages of neurodevelopment from induction to postnatal brain development, covering neural plate regionalization, neural tube closure, and fate commitment.
This paper investigates the fatigue upgrading of typical cover plate joint connections in existing steel bridge girders through cover plate extension. The upgraded detail is created by removing the existing transverse end weld, then welding the extension t ...
2018
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The rocks forming a volcanic edifice or dome are typically saturated or partially-saturated with water. However, most experiments aimed at better understanding the mechanical behaviour of volcanic rocks have been performed on dry samples, and therefore mos ...
The composition of the convecting asthenospheric mantle that feeds the mantle wedge can be investigated via rear-arc lavas that have minimal slab influence. This "ambient mantle wedge" composition (the composition of the wedge prior to the addition of a sl ...