Fig. 1: Maps of the Caribbean study area.
From: Caribbean plate tilted and actively dragged eastwards by low-viscosity asthenospheric flow
a Topographic and bathymetry. Plate boundaries of Bird73 are colored-coded as active spreading centers (yellow lines); extinct spreading centers (yellow dashed lines); transform (green lines); subduction zones (red lines with teeth). LAT lesser Antilles trench, CAT central America trench, NPDB north Panama deformation belt, SCDB south Caribbean deformation belt, MT Muertos trench, PFZ Panama fracture zone, UNR upper Nicaraguan rise, LNR lower Nicaraguan rise. Dark orange shaded areas show continental crust74. b Satellite free air gravity anomaly33. The Caribbean oceanic plateau is bounded within the bold black line. c Sedimentary thickness constrained by seismic reflection, refraction, and borehole (see Supplementary Note 2 for references). d Age of the oceanic lithosphere from marine magnetic anomalies75 with Caribbean lithospheric ages slightly shifted to between 100 and 80 Ma based on recent dating results30, and references therein (see “Methods” for details). Bold black lines are plate boundaries as in (a).
