Study of plate tectonics investigates the history of the Caribbean | Empire News

Scientists from Imperial College London and her collaborators have discovered one of the last pieces of the global tectonic puzzle.

The study, published in Nature Communications, provides new insight into how and when part of the Earth’s crust formed beneath the Caribbean — something that has long been unclear.

The Earth’s “crust” is divided into seven or eight major pieces and many smaller pieces, known as tectonic plates. When these plates move they can lead to powerful earthquakes and violent volcanic eruptions, and the Caribbean is often shaken by such catastrophic events.

“The Caribbean plate lies below Central America and the Caribbean and is surrounded by three other plates, which makes it a particularly dynamic region with a lot of seismic activity,” says Professor Saskia Joyce of the Imperial Department of Earth Sciences and Engineering (ESE). “We reconstructed how this plate moved through time, and compared our modeling to X-ray-type images made with earthquake waves recorded by state-of-the-art instruments on the ocean floor.”

This new approach opens up new opportunities to advance our understanding. Department of Earth Science and Engineering by Professor Jenny Collier Imperial

The experiment was carried out aboard the British research vessel RRS James Cook in collaboration with geophysicists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Geophysical Institute in Germany. The data collected enabled the team to explore 1,200 kilometers below the Earth’s surface to photograph plate fragments that sank beneath the present-day Caribbean Ocean. This plate material moved and accumulated through subduction, a process in which one heavier plate sinks under another, returning material deeper into the Earth.

“Using plate reconstruction, we can determine where and when plate fragments sank into the Earth’s interior, and reveal movements at the plate boundaries surrounding the Caribbean over the past 100 million years,” says Benedikt Braszus, a master’s student in geophysics. per KIT and lead author of the paper.

The researchers found that the material currently found in the depths of South America corresponds to seafloor fragments of the ancient Caribbean arm of the Atlantic that descended about 90 to 115 million years ago, before a marked uptick in volcanic activity occurred in the area and formed the main ocean plateau. At shallow depths, plate material has accumulated over the past 70 million years as subduction has formed the long arc of the adjacent plate of volcanoes (visible to the right of the tectonic map below).

Current tectonic map of the Caribbean. From Braszus et al. (2021)

They found that the toppling Atlantic plate appeared to be much more fragmented and twisted than the plates found in the depths of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Caribbean plate material contains a number of ruptures, gaps and fractures along the edges of the plates, which can be traced back to various stages of subduction between the Caribbean and other plates throughout history.

Professor Jenny Collier from ESE adds: “Traditionally, we use surface observations to determine the tectonic history of an area. This new approach, by imaging parts of the former sea floor now hundreds of kilometers inland, opens up new opportunities to advance our understanding.”

The research was conducted as part of the internationally collaborative project VoiLA (Volatile Recycling in the Lesser Antilles). This project, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), combines multidisciplinary measurements and models of the Lesser Antilles to understand subduction and its role in the region’s deep Earth water cycle.

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