The Caribbean hides the planet’s second-longest barrier reef
The Caribbean Sea covers about 2.75 million square kilometres of tropical North Atlantic between the Greater and Lesser Antilles, Central America, and northern South America. Its floor drops to 7,686 metres in the Cayman Trough, while the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef runs roughly 1,000 kilometres along Mexico to Honduras—Earth’s second-largest barrier reef.
The sea lies south of the Gulf of Mexico and south-west of the Sargasso Sea. The Greater Antilles from Cuba to Puerto Rico close it to the north, the Lesser Antilles from the Virgin Islands to Trinidad and Tobago to the east, the Venezuelan and Colombian coasts to the south, and Central America and Yucatán from Panama to Mexico to the west. Although Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados sit on the same continental shelf, they are counted as Atlantic rather than Caribbean. Its ragged coast includes the gulfs of Gonâve, Venezuela, Darién, Paria and Honduras and the Golfo de los Mosquitos. As of 2015 the region held 22 island territories and touched 12 mainland countries.
The deepest spot, the Cayman Trough, lies between the Cayman Islands and Jamaica. Along the coasts of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras runs the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, second only to Australia's in size.
The name honours the Caribs, one of the leading native peoples when Europeans arrived in the late fifteenth century. After Columbus reached the Bahamas in 1492 looking for a sea route to Asia, the Spanish called the islands the Antillas, so many European languages also speak of the Sea of the Antilles. Vikings had touched the Americas in the tenth century, but the Caribbean itself was unknown in Eurasia before Columbus. From the sixteenth century Europeans distinguished this North Sea from the South Sea, the Pacific beyond the Panama isthmus.
Spain went unchallenged for the first century of colonisation. England, the Dutch Republic, France, Courland and Denmark followed, and the sea became a crowded lane of European trade and shipping, a magnet for pirates such as Samuel Bellamy and Blackbeard. The International Hydrographic Organization fixes its northern entrances at the Windward Channel between Cuba and Haiti and the Mona Passage between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico.
Source: Caribbean Sea
