What's causing Puerto Rico's earthquakes?
Puerto Rico has a long history of earthquakes, although large events are rare. It sits at the edge of the Caribbean tectonic plate, where that plate is colliding with the North American plate. Such tectonic boundaries host the vast majority of the world’s quakes.“The entire island is an active plate boundary zone, just like California—earthquakes are fair game everywhere,” Susan Hough of the USGS says via email. But Puerto Rico’s geology is even more complex than most, because the island is being squashed in a tectonic battle.
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