Caribbean Islands Heading for the Atlantic

Sometimes even a Caribbean island wants to get away from it all. For the past 50 million years, the isles of the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Barbados and many smaller islands, have been very slowly moving east towards the Atlantic. The tectonic plate beneath the islands is easing away from its neighbor, the South American plate.

The gooey molten rock in the Earth's interior, or mantle, is slowly shoving the Caribbean east, according to University of Southern California earth scientists. The molten rock pushes against the South American continent, but South America sits on tectonic plate that is roughly three times thicker than average. When the unstoppable magma force, meets the immovable South American object, it is the Caribbean plate that gets shoved aside by the re-channeled molten rock.

"We're studying the Caribbean, but our models are run for the entire globe," lead author of the study published in Nature Geoscience, Meghan S. Miller, said in a press release. "We can look at similar features in Japan, Southern California and the Mediterranean, anywhere we have instruments to record earthquakes."

To understand the forces acting on the Caribbean, Miller and her colleagues used earthquake measurements to give clues to the make-up of the Earth's interior. They fed those measurements into a computer and created 176 models of the tectonic forces churning within the Earth.

Read more at Discovery News