Antigua & Barbuda Earthquake M6.0

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Welcome back to the channel of World Earthquake Update. We're heading over to the beautiful Caribbean or Caribbean to the islands of Antigua and Barbuda where on May 16th, 2026, they experienced a 6.0 earthquake at a depth of 19 miles and the epicenter was 17.3° [music] North and 61.1° West. This places it geographically about 40 miles off the coast of the island of Barbuda in the Caribbean Sea or the Atlantic Ocean. And these islands are part of the Leeward Islands, the northern end of the Lesser Antilles Islands, which stretches all the way from the Virgin Islands in the north down to Grenada in the south. Now, tectonically, this area is a convergent plate boundary between the Atlantic Ocean subducting under the Caribbean Plate, a minor plate. And this is occurring along the Lesser Antilles Trench. This trench is not as deep as the northern counterpart, [music] the Puerto Rican Trench. But the Lesser Antilles Trench is responsible for the subduction and [music] the formation of the volcanic arc, creating these amazingly beautiful Caribbean islands such as Antigua and Barbuda.

[00:01:20]Now, the North Atlantic Plate is subducting at around 20 to 25 cm per year, which is a fast subduction rate and causing the slab to create friction and [music] forming the earthquake they experienced on the 16th. Now, historically, large earthquakes are few and far between in this area of the planet. However, there was a 7.5 recorded in 1974 which affected these amazingly beautiful islands.