Powerful Earthquakes Strike the Caribbean

The quake occurred along the upper border of the Caribbean plate. (Wikipedia Commons)

A 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck in the Caribbean Sea at 2:10 p.m. EST on January 28. At a depth of 6.2 miles, the quake hit right between Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, and Cuba. People in the Bahamas, Haiti, Honduras, and Florida also felt the quake.

A businessman attending a conference in Jamaica described how “the floor started shaking,” while a doctor in Kingston “felt dizzy” and witnessed “the door...slamming consistently for a while.”

Buildings as far away as in Miami began evacuating people in the case of worse disaster, triggering fear ahead of the Super Bowl scheduled at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium on February 2. 

A tsunami threat with waves up to three feet high issued by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center increased panic in Belize, Cuba, Honduras, Mexico, the Cayman Islands, and Jamaica. However, the threat was later withdrawn.

United States Geological Survey (USGS) seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones tweeted that, because the quake “produced sideways motion on the fault,” the risk of a tsunami was “low.” 

Luckily, no lives were lost. The epicenter of the earthquake, 87 miles northwest of Montego Bay, Jamaica and 86 miles southwest of Niquero, Cuba, was in the middle of the ocean, away from land, people, and infrastructure. The quake did, however, strike near the fault line where the Caribbean and North American plates convene. This area is the most vulnerable to seismic activity in the region. 

While earthquakes in the Caribbean are less common, they are not completely rare. In the last 50 years, five quakes of a magnitude 6 or greater have occurred within 250 miles of Tuesday’s tremor, including a 6.8-magnitude quake in 2004 and a 6.2-magnitude quake in 1992. The destructive 7.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010, killing 316,000 people and leaving the country in ruins from which they are still recovering today, was closer to 300 miles away.

A series of aftershocks followed: up to 15 ensued off the shore of Puerto Rico, most of them around a magnitude of 2.5 (and therefore too minor to be felt); nine smaller quakes rocked the land between the Cayman Islands and Jamaica within 24 hours of the initial earthquake; an aftershock with its own magnitude of 6.1 on the Richter scale occurred 35 miles southeast of the Cayman Islands.

Individuals from all parts of the affected region contributed to a flood of social media posts detailing the quake’s immediate effects, sharing photos and videos with a wide audience from around the globe.

While damage and casualties were little to none, this earthquake was the Caribbean’s strongest on record since 1946.