Earthquakes in Jamaica: Live Map & the 1692 Port Royal Quake

Jamaica sits on the northern edge of the Caribbean plate, close to its complex boundary with the North American plate and the Gonâve microplate. The island is crossed by several active fault systems, including the Plantain Garden Fault in the east — part of the same Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system responsible for Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake — and lies just south of the Cayman Trough, a deep transform-and-spreading boundary that separates Jamaica from Cuba.

Jamaica's most infamous earthquake struck Port Royal on 7 June 1692. Ground shaking triggered soil liquefaction that swallowed roughly two-thirds of what was then one of the wealthiest and most notorious port cities in the Caribbean beneath the sea within minutes, killing an estimated 2,000 people outright and thousands more from disease and injury in the weeks that followed. The disaster effectively ended Port Royal's era as a regional capital and shifted commercial power to nearby Kingston.

Kingston itself was devastated on 14 January 1907, when a magnitude 6.5 earthquake struck close to the city, killing around 800 to 1,000 people and destroying much of its centre; fires that broke out afterwards, much like San Francisco the year before, compounded the damage. The disaster prompted Jamaica's first serious building-code reforms. Today the Earthquake Unit at the University of the West Indies, Mona — established in 1957 — monitors seismic activity across the island, since the same fault systems that produced the 1692 and 1907 disasters remain active and capable of generating another damaging earthquake.