Week 2: Plate Tectonics

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The book Natural Hazards states that tectonic plates are simply large broken up pieces of lithosphere (33). However,  the island of Jamaica lies in between two tectonic plates; the Gonave Microplate and the South Jamaican Microplate which are both Convergent boundaries.


Convergent  boundaries happen when plates move towards each other, in this case both move towards the island of Jamaica shown on the photo above. This is creating a subduction. There has only been two major earthquakes; one in 1692 that killed over 5,000 people and destroyed over 3,000 buildings. The second one was in 1907 that killed about 1,000 people and 9,000 were left homeless. 



Keller, Edward A., Duane E. DeVecchio, and Robert H. Blodgett. Natural Hazards: Earth's Processes as Hazards, Disasters, and Catastrophes. Boston: Pearson, 2015. Print.
https://jis.gov.jm/information/get-thefacts/major-earthquaks-jamaica/ 
https://caribbeantectonics.weebly.com/caribbean-microplates.html

Comments

  1. Ana GGFebruary 8, 2019 at 8:39 AM

    Very nice post and images. Your country in definitely in the 'middle of things'. Will be looking forward to reading what you find out about quakes next week.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yojna PrasadFebruary 9, 2019 at 12:02 AM

    Hi Destinee, your post on Jamaica's tectonic plates looks very neat. After reading all the blogs that didn't already have a comment, I decided to choose the one that was different from my own. After reading your blog I learned that Jamaica lies in between two tectonic plates while my country Fiji lies between three plates and also in the Pacific ring of fire. It was also interesting to know that our country's tectonic plates are different in nature as Jamaica's is a convergent and Fiji's is a divergent. Something that our countries shared in common in regards to tectonic plates is that they've both created some major subduction. Also I want to comment on the fact that Fiji has also experienced many earthquakes but not as big as the ones that Jamaica had to face in the past. Thank you for such a short yet informative blog post on Jamaica's tectonic plates, I will be looking forward to your next blogs to come.

    ReplyDelete

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