Greater Antilles

The Greater Antilles or Greater Antilles (in French: Grandes Antilles; in English: Greater Antilles: in Haitian Creole Gwo Zantiy) are a group of islands in the northern Caribbean Sea, located east of Yucatán (Mexico) and southeast of Florida (United States) and west of the Lesser Antilles. The group is made up of the Island of Cuba, the Isle of Youth, Jamaica, Hispaniola (which includes the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and Puerto Rico. The Bahamas, although neighboring, are not part of this geographic unit along with the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Cayman Islands, and Bermuda.

The Greater Antilles make up almost 90% of the landmass of all of the West Indies, as well as more than 90% of its population. The rest of the land belongs to the Bahamas and the Lesser Antilles archipelago, which is a chain of islands to the east (stretching from north to south and encompassing the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea, where it meets the Atlantic Ocean). and to the south (extending from east to west from the northern coast of South America).

The word "Antilles" originated in the period before the European conquest of the New World. Europeans used the word Antilia as one of the mysterious lands that appear on medieval charts, sometimes as an archipelago, sometimes as a continuous land of greater or lesser extent, its location in the middle of the ocean fluctuating between the Canary Islands and Eurasia.

Geography

The Greater Antilles rest on a submarine massif of the Common Antilles and are crossed by a steep and high range of mountains, whose highest peaks range between 2,000 and 3,000 m a.s.l. no. m. (meters above sea level) that culminates in the Dominican Republic (in Pico Duarte with 3,087 m above sea level) and declines, on both sides, in Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico. These [Antilles] mountains are composed of limestone, with outcrops of other rocks, all of them much older than those of eruptive origin in the Lesser Antilles and without traces of recent volcanic activity. The Bahamas, on the other hand, are islands of coral origin. In the past, the Bahamas were not even considered to be part of the Antilles, although their inclusion as a third group within them is currently widespread (Greater Antilles, Lesser Antilles and the Bahamas).

Hispaniola has the highest mountain in the Caribbean, the Duarte peak with 3,087 meters; and the largest Antillean lake (Lago Enriquillo), where the lowest point in the region is also located, at 79 meters below sea level. Cuba, however, has the longest river in the Antilles, the Cauto River, with 343 kilometers and is the largest island in the region.

The Greater Antilles are located in a part of Central America called the Antillean archipelago and are washed by the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.

Some of the mineral resources that we can find in the Greater Antilles are: bauxite, gold, copper, iron, silver, marble, among others.

Geology

The Greater Antilles, the result of a slow tectonic uplift and various marine regressions, are characterized by the presence of karstic sedimentary rocks of coral and marine origin and by a base of ancient volcanic arc formations, sometimes revealed by tectonic inclinations, thrusts or simply by erosion. The three main mountain ranges described as the North Caribbean, north of the Caribbean Sea, meet to the west at the island of Puerto Rico, the northern line of Cuba extends the plateaus of the Yucatan peninsula to the North American continent in the west, the central mountain range it stands out in southeastern Cuba and central Hispaniola, and the southernmost range, vigorous from the start, makes itself felt in Jamaica before joining southern Haiti. The central mountain range of Hispaniola rises rapidly, often reaching 2,000 meters in altitude and reaching over 3,000 meters. The strength of the relief is related to very deep oceanic trenches, more than 9000 meters, further west, north of Puerto Rico. The deepest oceanic trench in the Atlantic Ocean (-9,210 m) is located in the extreme north of Puerto Rico.

Although most of the island of Cuba, as well as the vast partially emerged calcareous plateau of the Bahamas, sits on top of the North American plate, microplates exist to the south of this large plate, distant products of plate rupture of the Caribbean appeared in the Tertiary era, such as the "Gonaives microplate", which appears between southern Cuba and northern Jamaica and extends to southern Haiti, which explains the serious seismic risks in the Port-au-Prince area. Volcanism is much more frequent on the seabed than on dry land. One of the drivers of seismic and volcanic activity is the sinking of the Atlantic oceanic plate under the Caribbean plate.

Demographics

The Greater Antilles are considered part of Latin America. With a population of 38 million inhabitants, it constitutes 6% of the total population of Latin America. The capital of the Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo, with more than 2 million inhabitants, is the largest city in the Greater Antilles. Other big cities are Havana, Port-au-Prince and San Juan. The quality of life within the Greater Antilles is similar between Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, whose Human Development Index classifies them as "high human development". Cuba, the independent nation with the highest HDI, ranks, however, below Puerto Rico and the Cayman Islands, both of which are ranked "very high". Haiti is an exception, as it has the lowest Human Development Index in the Greater Antilles and all of the Americas, at 0.498, classifying it as having "low human development".

Administrative political division

The Greater Antilles are administratively divided into 4 independent countries and 1 dependency.

Country	Area (km2)	Population (est. 2009)	Density (per km2)	IDH 2015	Capital	Languages
Cuba	110.860	11.242.621	102.4	0.769 (high)	Havana	Spanish
Haiti	27.750	9.8 million	292,7	0,483 (low)	Port-au-Prince	French Haitian Criollo
Jamaica	10.991	2.735.520	248,6	0.735 (high)	Kingston	English
Dominican Republic	48.730	10.090.000	207,05	0.760 (high)	Santo Domingo	Spanish
Units
Puerto Rico	9.104	3.994.259	430.2	0.838 (very high)	San Juan	Spanish
Total	207.435	37.931.400	192,5	0,803 (very high)

Additional bibliography

• Collective geological article by Aubouin, Blanchet, Mansy, Tardy, Mercier de Lépinay, Stephan, Bourgeois, Vicente, on « Amérique (Structure et milieu) - Géologie » "America (Estructura y entorno) - Geología"), Encyclopædia Universalis, 2010. In particular chapter 3 (in French)
• Jacques Butterlin, Géologie structurale de la région des Caraïbes: Mexique, Amérique centrale, Antilles, Cordillère caraïbe, Paris: Masson, 1977. (in French)
• Françoise Hatzenberger, Paysages et végétations des Antilles, Karthala éditions, 2001, 508 pages, ISBN 9782845861268 (in French)
• Cohen, S.; Groene, J.; Werner, L.; Vladimir, U.; Williams, D.; Walter, C.; Hiller, H.L. (1997). Caribbean: The Greater Antilles, Bermuda, Bahamas. Explore the world Nelles guide (in English). Nelles Verlag. ISBN 978-3-88618-403-3. 254 pages.
• University, J.R.P.B.S. (1995). Anolis Lizards of the Caribbean: Ecology, Evolution, and Plate Tectonics: Ecology, Evolution, and Plate Tectonics. Oxford Series in Ecology and Evolution (in English). Oxford University Press, USA. p. 88. ISBN 978-0-19-536191-9.
• Rogozinski, Jan. A Brief History of the Caribbean. New York: Facts on File, 1992. (in English)