Back to Homepage Caribbean History Caribbean until 1900 1900s Caribbean Caribbean Area Bahama Islands Jamaica, Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Morant and Pedro Cays Leeward Islands Windward Islands Barbados Trinidad and Tobago Guiana Honduras Martinique   Guadeloupe and Dependencies French Guiana Clipperton Island The Territory of Curaçao Surinam Economy The International Importance of the Banana Trade United States Trade with the Caribbean Oil on the Caribbean

Other Tilted Islands The tilting of an island ought not to be regarded as in any sense a peculiar, still less an abnormal phenomenon. It is simply the manifestation at the ocean surface of a tilting of the underlying sea floor, similar to the tilting of parts of continental areas as attested by the occurrence of faults or flexures in which formerly horizontal strata are inclined. The young volcanic island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic appears to have been gently tilted, so that a part of its cliff-base platform is emerged in a lowland of crescentic pattern, locally called "the plateau," around the northwest part of the shore. St. Croix, above described, seems to have been given a gentle southward slant in the passage from its first cycle of subsidence and aggradation to its second cycle of degradation. Uvea, the northwesternmost of the three Loyalty Islands, northeast of New Caledonia, is manifestly the up-tilted half of a former atoll slanting to the west, just as its companions, Lifu and Mare, are evenly uplifted atolls. The Pelew group, east of the Philippines, appears to have been as a whole gently inclined to the north, for its southern members consist of emerged reef limestones and an elevated atoll stands a little farther south, while its northern part bears no limestones and is followed by some little sea-level atolls. The tilting of this group was implied by Darwin 50 years ago in explanation of the above facts which had been described by Semper; the implication seems to hold good, in spite of Semper's incredulity about it. The tilting of Antigua is stronger than that of any of the other tilted islands here mentioned; but that does not make the tilting improbable. Home