Caribbean

History

The past. With the sea about 120 metres lower, about 240,000 square kilometres of today’s shallow seas on the Caribbean plate were dry land, and its land was about 60 percent larger. The widest plain was the Mosquito Coast shelf off Honduras and Nicaragua, and Pedro Bank, south of Jamaica, was an island of about 7,600 square kilometres. Puerto Rico and all the Virgin Islands but St Croix were one island, so were Anguilla, St Martin and St Barthelemy, and Antigua and Barbuda, and Trinidad was joined to South America. The land was already dry when the timeline begins; because the shelves are shallow, the rising sea drowned most of it late, between 14,341 and 8,051 years ago. The lines that stand for the shallow sea turn most of the way to the colour of land, all at once, and only across those spans.

89 million years ago

Huge lava floods thickened the ocean floor that now forms this plate, out in the Pacific before it moved between the Americas.

2.8 million years ago

Land rose to close the seaway between the Americas, cutting the Caribbean Sea off from the Pacific.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Khan et al. 2017, Quaternary Science Reviews 155:13; Peltier and Fairbanks 2006, Quaternary Science Reviews 25:3322; Heatwole et al. 1981, Atoll Research Bulletin 251 · Sinton et al. 1998, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 155:221 · O'Dea et al. 2016, Science Advances 2:e1600883