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The youngest igneous rocks, in the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica, are from 63 Ma. That the CLIP originated in the Pacific is obvious because fragments of oceanic crust accreted to the margins of the Caribbean, for example on Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, contain fauna of Pacific provenance. [8]
The Caribbean plate is a mostly oceanic tectonic plate underlying Central America and the Caribbean Sea off the northern coast of South America. Roughly 3.2 million square kilometres (1.2 million square miles) in area, the Caribbean plate borders the North American plate, the South American plate, the Nazca plate and the Cocos plate.
In 1992, Coffin and Eldholm initially defined the term "large igneous province" as representing a variety of mafic igneous provinces with areal extent greater than 100,000 km 2 that represented "massive crustal emplacements of predominantly mafic (magnesium- and iron-rich) extrusive and intrusive rock, and originated via processes other than 'normal' seafloor spreading."
Island-like outcrops of metamorphic rocks in the eastern Llanos are visible remnants of Precambrian times. During the 289-million-year-long Paleozoic Era, which began 539 million years ago, the ocean invaded the area which is exposed in Colombia's Andean zone, as subterranean volcanic eruptions in the western part of the country spouted lava. [1]
The oldest rocks are approximately 190 million years old and are located at Sierra Bermeja in the southwest part of the island. These rocks may represent part of the oceanic crust and are believed to come from the Pacific Ocean realm. During the Carboniferous period, Puerto Rico was submerged. [2]
Cuba is located in an area with several active fault systems which produce on average about 2,000 seismic events each year. [5] While most registered seismic events pass unnoticed, the island has been struck by a number of destructive earthquakes over the past four centuries, including several major quakes with a magnitude of 7.0 or above.
Instead, the island of Barbados is the exposed part of the Barbados Ridge Accretionary Prism, left as deep ocean sediments "scraped" to the surface as the Atlantic oceanic crust subducted beneath the Caribbean Plate. The oldest rocks are in the Scotland Formation and include Eocene age turbidite and radiolarites. This unit is 4.5 kilometers ...
The island of Curaçao began to form within the past 145 million years, beginning in the Cretaceous, as part of the Lesser Antilles island arc.Because the island was submerged for large parts of its history, reef environments formed atop thick layers of mafic volcanic rock, producing carbonate sedimentary rocks.