Climate and Life in the Caribbean Basin

Abstract

The Caribbean Basin is contained roughly between latitudes 10 to 27°N and longitudes 57 to 87°W. The basin which derives its name from the word “Carib”, name of one of the ancestral Indian groups of the region, is an archipelago curving 4,000 km from Florida in the north to Venezuela in the south (Figure 1). The west side faces Central America. The northwest boundary is the Gulf of Mexico which is itself separated from the Caribbean Sea by a line running between the Yucatan channel and Florida Keys. To the east, the basin is separated from the Atlantic Ocean by an arc of islands starting with the Bahamas to the north and ending with Grenada and Trinidad-Tobago in the south. The main chain of islands is the Greater Antilles comprising Cuba, Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti), Jamaica and Puerto Rico. The narrower chain is the Lesser Antilles, a collection of smaller islands stretching from the Virgin Islands in the north to Grenada in the south. The Lesser Antilles is further divided into windward islands which lie south of latitude 15° and leeward islands which lie north of the line. The islands of the Lesser Antilles and the eastern Caribbean are used synonymously in this chapter. The Caribbean and West Indies are also used interchangeably to refer to all the islands in both the Greater and Lesser Antilles. In other contexts, these two terms, Caribbean and West Indies, also include all countries of Central America as well as Venezuela, Surinam, Guyana and Colombia on the South American mainland and the islands that form its north coast.