Earthquakes are relatively rare in the Caribbean, and usually not very powerful.
The devastating January 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti was an exception -- a magnitude 7.0 temblor on the Richter scale that had its epicenter just 10 miles from the city. The Haiti earthquake resulted from a slippage along the Enriquilla-Plantain Garden Fault that runs east-west through Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. Hispaniola also is home to another major fault line, the Septentrional Fault, which cuts across the northern interior of the island and also underlies Cuba.
The Western Antilles islands of the Caribbean are home to a string of active, dormant and extinct volcanoes. The most notable is the Soufriere Hills volcano, which had a series of major eruptions in the 1990s that resulted in the destruction of the island's capital city, Plymouth. In all, there are 17 active volcanoes in the Caribbean region, including Mount Pelee on Martinique, La Grande Soufriere on Guadeloupe, Soufriere St. Vincent in the Grenadines, and Kick 'em Jenny -- an underground volcano off the coast of Grenada that could someday become a new island (the summit is now more than 500 feet below the ocean's surface).
