Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault Zone

The Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone is a system of active, left lateral strike slip faults running along the southern side of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, through Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and continuing into Jamaica near the Plantain Garden River. It marks part of the boundary between the North American and Caribbean plates and accommodates roughly 20.6 millimeters of lateral motion each year; together with the Septentrional-Oriente fault zone to the north it is thought to bound a proposed Gonave microplate of about 190,000 square kilometers shearing off the Caribbean plate. The fault has generated major historical earthquakes, including a magnitude 7.5 event in Jamaica in 1692, a magnitude 7.5 quake that struck Port-au-Prince in 1770, the devastating magnitude 7.0 Haiti earthquake of 2010, and a magnitude 7.2 earthquake on Haiti's Tiburon Peninsula in 2021.