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Caribbean Sea
The tropical sea of pirates, coral, and a thousand islands
Warm, turquoise, and studded with islands, the Caribbean is the sea that gave the world the picture-postcard tropics. It washes the curving chain of the Antilles, the beaches of Mexico's Riviera Maya, and the coasts of seven Central and South American nations. Beneath its placid surface lies one of the most geologically active corners of the Atlantic world, where its own tectonic plate grinds against its neighbours, and beneath its history lie the empires, sugar plantations, and buccaneers that fought over it for three centuries.
At roughly 2.75 million square kilometres it is among the largest seas on the planet, bounded by the Greater and Lesser Antilles to the north and east and by the American mainland to the west and south. Its floor is divided into several deep basins by undersea ridges, and at the Cayman Trough — a transform fault between Jamaica and the Cayman Islands — it drops to about 7,686 metres, the deepest point in the Atlantic system. The sea feeds the Gulf Stream: water entering past the Antilles flows out through the Yucatán Channel into the Gulf of Mexico, then north along the American coast.
Columbus reached these waters in 1492, and within decades the Caribbean became the contested heart of European colonialism, its islands carved up by Spain, Britain, France, and the Netherlands and worked by enslaved Africans on sugar estates. Pirates preyed on the treasure fleets sailing for Seville. Today the sea sustains a tourism economy worth tens of billions of dollars, shelters the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, and faces mounting threats from hurricanes, coral bleaching, and rising seas.