Greater Antilles: Northern Caribbean Plate Kinematics

GPS Data and Horizontal Displacement

Legend to Reading GPS Data

• Blue arrows indicate the motion of the GPS station with respect to the stable North American craton and the  blue ellipses are their error ellipses (Dixon et al, 1998).

• Yellow arrows represent motion with respect to the Turks and Caicos stations and the yellow ellipses are their error ellipses (Dixon et al, 1998). 

Recent Data

There are a lack of constrained global plate motion models for the northern Caribbean region, and those models probably do not record accurately the relative plate motion, which has also been under debate recently (Dolan et al., 1998).  Previous values from the NUVEL-1 global plate motion model estimated 11 mm/yr of lateral movement; however, new GPS data has recorded movement ~20-25 mm/yr (Dolan et al., 1998).

Current Campaigns Goals

Between 1994-1998 over 30 GPS campaign sites were established throughout the Caribbean which will be used to address the following issues:

1. The existence of a single, rigid block consisting of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands,

2. The relative motion between the eastern Dominican Republic and western Puerto Rico and the concomitant opening rate of the Mona Canyon,

3. Possible elastic strain accumulation along mapped structures in the Dominican Republic and identification of other currently unrecognized zones, where displacement is being accommodated, and

4. Offshore displacement to the north and south of western Puerto Rico (Brink et al., 1999).

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