Where it is and what it carries
The Caribbean Plate covers about 3 million square kilometers, or 0.58% of Earth’s surface. Most of it lies beneath the Caribbean Sea, but it also carries land. All of Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico sit on it, along with the islands of the Lesser Antilles such as Barbados, Saint Lucia and Grenada. About half of Trinidad and Tobago and a quarter of Costa Rica are also on the plate, while Cuba lies almost entirely on the North American Plate to the north.
Its crust is mixed. The central Caribbean floor is an oceanic plateau, much thicker than normal ocean crust. The Central American part, including Honduras and Nicaragua, is continental and volcanic arc crust.
What happens at its edges
The northern edge, 3,508 km long, is a transform boundary with the North American Plate, with an average relative speed of about 1.7 cm/yr. It runs from the Motagua Fault in Guatemala, through the Cayman Trough, where a short spreading center opens new seafloor, and along strike-slip faults through Jamaica and Hispaniola to the Puerto Rico Trench.
The eastern edge is the Lesser Antilles subduction zone. Here Atlantic seafloor of the North American and South American plates sinks beneath the Caribbean Plate. The southern edge, shared with South America at about 1.9 cm/yr, turns into transform faults that cross northern Venezuela and Trinidad. Farther west, the plate meets the North Andes Plate at about 1.2 cm/yr, where Caribbean seafloor slowly underthrusts northern Colombia, and the Panama Plate at about 1.1 cm/yr along the North Panama Deformed Belt.
The western edge is the fastest. At the Middle America Trench, the Cocos Plate subducts beneath El Salvador and Nicaragua at about 7.6 cm/yr.
Earthquakes
The dataset lists 92 earthquakes of magnitude 6.5 or larger on the plate since 1900, none of magnitude 8. The largest was the 1946 Dominican Republic earthquake (M7.76) near Samana Bay, which produced a deadly tsunami. Several others reached M7.7, including the 1943 earthquake north of Puerto Rico, the 1992 Nicaragua tsunami earthquake, the 2001 El Salvador earthquake and the 2020 Jamaica earthquake in the Cayman Trough. In 2025 an M7.6 earthquake struck south of the Cayman Islands. The 2010 Haiti earthquake (M7.0) was smaller but far deadlier, because it hit close to a crowded capital.
Volcanoes
The plate holds 59 volcanoes in the dataset, in two arcs. In the west, Cocos Plate subduction feeds the Central American Volcanic Arc, including Masaya, Telica, San Cristobal and Momotombo in Nicaragua and San Miguel in El Salvador. In the east, the Lesser Antilles arc includes La Soufriere on Saint Vincent, which erupted in 2021, the submarine volcano Kick ’em Jenny north of Grenada, and Soufriere Hills on Montserrat. Mount Pelee on Martinique destroyed the town of Saint-Pierre in 1902.