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Cayman Trough

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The Cayman Trough, or Cayman Trench, also called Bartlett Deep, or Bartlett Trough, is a complex transform fault zone pull apart basin which contains a small spreading ridge on the floor of the western Caribbean Sea between Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. It forms part of the tectonic boundary between the North American Plate and the Caribbean Plate. It extends from the Windward Passage, going south of the Sierra Maestra Cuba toward Guatemala. The transform continues onshore as the Motagua Fault which cuts across Guatemala and back offshore under the Pacific Ocean where it intersects the Middle America Trench subduction zone. The relatively narrow trough trends east-northeast to west-southwest and has a maximum depth of ; it is the deepest point in the Caribbean Sea. Within the trough is a slowly spreading north-south ridge which may be the result of an offset or gap of approximately along the main fault trace. The Cayman spreading ridge shows a long-term opening rate of The eastern section of the trough has been named the Gonâve Microplate. The Gonâve plate extends from the spreading ridge east to the island of Hispanola. It is bounded on the north by the Oriente and Septentrional fault zones. On the south the Gonâve is bounded by the Walton fault, the Jamaica restraining bend and the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone. The two bounding strike slip fault zones are left lateral. The motion relative to the North American Plate is to the east and the motion relative to the Caribbean Plate is . C. DeMets and M. Wiggins-Grandison, ''Deformation of Jamaica and motion of the Gonˆave microplate from GPS and seismic data,'' Geophys. J. Int. (2007) 168, p. 375-6

During the Eocene the trough was the site of a subduction zone which formed the volcanic arc of the Cayman Ridge and the Sierra Maestra volcanic terrain of Cuba to the north as the northeastward moving Caribbean Plate was subducted beneath the southwest-moving North American Plate, or as some researchers contend, beneath a plate fragment dubbed the East Cuban Microplate.

the Cayman Trough has not been explored; a UK team from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton (NOCS) equipped with an autonomously controlled, robot submarine, are set to begin mapping the full extent of the trench and finding the volcanic vents on the ocean floor.

Cayman_Trough
Source: Wikipedia