The 1692 Jamaica earthquake struck

Port Royal Port Royal is a village located at the end of the Palisadoes, at the mouth of Kingston Harbour, in southeastern Jamaica. Founded in 1494 by the Spanish, it was once the largest city in the Caribbean, functioning as the centre of shipping and ...

Jamaica Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of Hispa ...

, on 7 June. A stopped pocket watch found in the harbor during a 1959 excavationSunken Pirate City at Port Royal
/ref> indicated that it occurred around 11:43 AM local time. Known as the "storehouse and treasury of the

West Indies The West Indies is a subregion of North America, surrounded by the North Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea that includes 13 independent island countries and 18 dependencies and other territories in three major archipelagos: the Greate ...

" and as "one of the wickedest places on Earth", Port Royal was, at the time, the unofficial capital of Jamaica and one of the busiest and wealthiest ports in the Americas, as well as a common home port for many of the

privateer A privateer is a private person or ship that engages in maritime warfare under a commission of war. Since robbery under arms was a common aspect of seaborne trade, until the early 19th century all merchant ships carried arms. A sovereign or deleg ...

s and

pirate Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable goods. Those who conduct acts of piracy are called pirates, v ...

s operating on the

Caribbean Sea The Caribbean Sea ( es, Mar Caribe; french: Mer des Caraïbes; ht, Lanmè Karayib; jam, Kiaribiyan Sii; nl, Caraïbische Zee; pap, Laman Karibe) is a sea of the Atlantic Ocean in the tropics of the Western Hemisphere. It is bounded by Mexic ...

. The 1692 earthquake caused most of the city to sink below sea level. About 2,000 people died as a result of the earthquake and the following

tsunami A tsunami ( ; from ja, 津波, lit=harbour wave, ) is a series of waves in a water body caused by the displacement of a large volume of water, generally in an ocean or a large lake. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other underwater exp ...

, and another 3,000 people died in the following days due to injuries and disease.

Tectonic setting

The island of Jamaica lies on the boundary between the

Caribbean Plate The Caribbean Plate is a mostly oceanic tectonic plate underlying Central America and the Caribbean Sea off the north coast of South America. Roughly 3.2 million square kilometers (1.2 million square miles) in area, the Caribbean Plate border ...

and the

Gonâve Microplate Gonave may refer to: * Gulf of Gonâve *Gonâve Island * Gonâve Microplate See also *Gonaïves Gonaïves (; ht, Gonayiv, ) is a commune in northern Haiti, and the capital of the Artibonite department of Haiti. It has a population of about 300 ...

. The Gonâve microplate is a long strip of mainly

oceanic crust Oceanic crust is the uppermost layer of the oceanic portion of the tectonic plates. It is composed of the upper oceanic crust, with pillow lavas and a dike complex, and the lower oceanic crust, composed of troctolite, gabbro and ultramafic ...

formed by the Cayman

spreading ridge A mid-ocean ridge (MOR) is a seafloor mountain system formed by plate tectonics. It typically has a depth of about and rises about above the deepest portion of an ocean basin. This feature is where seafloor spreading takes place along a dive ...

within a

strike-slip In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements. Large faults within Earth's crust result from the action of plate tectonic ...

pull-apart basin on the northern transform margin of the Caribbean Plate with the

North American Plate The North American Plate is a tectonic plate covering most of North America, Cuba, the Bahamas, extreme northeastern Asia, and parts of Iceland and the Azores. With an area of , it is the Earth's second largest tectonic plate, behind the Paci ...

. Jamaica was formed by uplift associated with a restraining bend along this strike-slip structure. The

focal mechanism The focal mechanism of an earthquake describes the deformation in the source region that generates the seismic waves. In the case of a fault-related event it refers to the orientation of the fault plane that slipped and the slip vector and ...

s of earthquakes around Jamaica are primarily sinistral strike-slip along WSW-ENE trending faults and minor reverse or thrust motion on NW-SE trending faults. The 1692 event is thought to have occurred on one of these

strike-slip fault In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements. Large faults within Earth's crust result from the action of plate tectoni ...

Damage

Two-thirds of the town, about 13 ha (33 acres), sank into the sea immediately after the main shock. According to Robert Renny in his ''An History of Jamaica'' (1807): "All the wharves sunk at once, and in the space of two minutes, nine-tenths of the city were covered with water, which was raised to such a height, that it entered the uppermost rooms of the few houses which were left standing. The tops of the highest houses were visible in the water and surrounded by the masts of vessels, which had been sunk along with them." Before the earthquake the town consisted of 6,500 inhabitants living in about 2,000 buildings, many constructed of brick and with more than one storey, and all built on loose sand. During the shaking, the sand liquefied and the buildings, along with their occupants, appeared to flow into the sea. More than twenty ships moored in the harbour were capsized. One ship, the

frigate A frigate () is a type of warship. In different eras, the roles and capabilities of ships classified as frigates have varied somewhat. The name frigate in the 17th to early 18th centuries was given to any full-rigged ship built for speed an ...

, was carried over the rooftops by the tsunami. During the main shock, the sand was said to have formed waves. Fissures repeatedly opened and closed, crushing many people. After the shaking stopped the sand again solidified, trapping many victims. Palisadoes cemetery, where the grave of the former pirate Sir Henry Morgan was located, was one of the parts of the city to fall into the sea; his body has never been found. At Liguanea (present-day Kingston), all the houses were destroyed and water was ejected from 12 m (40 foot) deep wells. Almost all the houses at St. Jago (

Spanish Town Spanish Town ( jam, label= Jamaican Creole, Panish Tong) is the capital and the largest town in the parish of St. Catherine in the historic county of Middlesex, Jamaica. It was the Spanish and British capital of Jamaica from 1534 until 1872. T ...

) were destroyed. Many

landslide Landslides, also known as landslips, are several forms of mass wasting that may include a wide range of ground movements, such as rockfalls, deep-seated slope failures, mudflows, and debris flows. Landslides occur in a variety of environmen ...

s occurred across the island. The largest, the Judgement Cliff landslide, displaced the land surface by up to 800 m and killed 19 people. Several rivers were temporarily dammed and a few days after the earthquakes the harbour became flooded with large numbers of trees stripped of their bark brought down after one of these dams was breached. A pocket watch, made in the Netherlands by the French maker Blondel in about 1686, was recovered during underwater

archaeological Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...

investigations led by Edwin Link in 1959. The watch was stopped with its hands pointing to 11:43 AM; this matches well with contemporary accounts of the timing of the earthquake.

Aftermath

Even before the destruction was complete, some of the survivors began looting, breaking into homes and warehouses. The dead were also robbed and stripped, and, in some cases, had fingers cut off to remove the rings that they wore. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, it was common to ascribe the destruction to

divine retribution Divine retribution is supernatural punishment of a person, a group of people, or everyone by a deity in response to some action. Many cultures have a story about how a deity exacted punishment upon previous inhabitants of their land, causing t ...

on the people of Port Royal for their sinful ways. Members of the Jamaica Council declared: "We are become by this an instance of God Almighty's severe judgement." This view of the disaster was not confined to Jamaica; in

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

, the Reverend

Cotton Mather Cotton Mather (; February 12, 1663 – February 13, 1728) was a New England Puritan clergyman and a prolific writer. Educated at Harvard College, in 1685 he joined his father Increase as minister of the Congregationalist Old North Meeting H ...

said in a letter to his uncle: "Behold, an accident speaking to all our English America". After the earthquake, the town was partially rebuilt. But the colonial government was relocated to

, which had been the capital under Spanish rule. Port Royal was devastated by a fire in 1703 and a

hurricane A tropical cyclone is a rapidly rotating storm system characterized by a low-pressure center, a closed low-level atmospheric circulation, strong winds, and a spiral arrangement of thunderstorms that produce heavy rain and squalls. Dep ...

in 1722. Most of the sea trade moved to Kingston. By the late 18th century, Port Royal was largely abandoned.

Characteristics

Earthquake

There were three separate shocks, each with increasing intensity, culminating in the mainshock. The estimated size of the event was 7.5 on the

moment magnitude scale The moment magnitude scale (MMS; denoted explicitly with or Mw, and generally implied with use of a single M for magnitude) is a measure of an earthquake's magnitude ("size" or strength) based on its seismic moment. It was defined in a 1979 pa ...

. Despite reports of the town flowing into the sea, the main result of the earthquake was subsidence caused by liquefaction. This would also explain an eyewitness account of houses being swallowed and people being buried up to their necks in the sand. The probable triggering of the Judgement Cliff landslide during the earthquake occurred along the line of the Plantain Garden fault. Movement on this structure has been suggested as the cause of the earthquake.

Landslides

The Judgement Cliff landslide is a complex rock-slide slump with a volume of about 131–181 × 10⁶ m³. The slip surface is found within zones of clay and shale with gypsum at the base of a limestone unit. This landslide occurred after the earthquake but it remains possible that heavy rain over the few days after the event, or possibly during a hurricane in October later that year was the final trigger for the slip.

Tsunami

The sea was observed to retreat by about at Liguanea (probably near Kingston) while at Yallahs it withdrew . It returned as a high wave that swept over the land. One possible cause of the tsunami is thought to be the slump and

grain flow A grain flow is a type of sediment-gravity flow in which the fluid can be either air or water, acts only as a lubricant, and grains within the flow remain in suspension due to grain-to-grain collisions that generate a dispersive pressure to preven ...

into the harbour from beneath the town itself, although the waves in the harbour may be better described as

seiche A seiche ( ) is a standing wave in an enclosed or partially enclosed body of water. Seiches and seiche-related phenomena have been observed on lakes, reservoirs, swimming pools, bays, harbors, caves and seas. The key requirement for formation of ...

s and larger waves reported elsewhere, such as at Saint Ann's Bay, are explained as the result of an entirely separate submarine landslide, also triggered by the earthquake.

Future seismic hazard

Estimates of current deformation of Jamaica suggest that sufficient strain has accumulated to generate a M=7.0–7.3 earthquake, similar in size to the 1692 event. This may mean that a repeat of this event is imminent, although this estimate relies on many assumptions, such as that none of the motion on the Plantain Garden fault is accommodated by aseismic creep.