Forbidden Islands
10 Discoveries in Jamaica That Science Can’t Explain
Between 1968 and 2008 the beaches at Negril lost an average of 23.4 metres of width, and rising sea level can account for about 6 of them. A pond in Saint Ann catches fire when a flame touches it, a die-off that killed about 98 percent of one Caribbean sea urchin has no identified cause, and the fault behind the 1692 Port Royal earthquake has never been identified. Each is still an open question.
In this video, we explore:
→ Two bays on the western tip of the island where the sand has retreated about 59 centimetres a year, and where a 2022 study concluded that sea level rise cannot explain the loss by itself
→ A warm mineral pond on a river bank that lights when a flame touches the surface, where the gas tested at 98.34 percent methane in 1924 and a 12,820-foot exploration well found no commercial oil
→ A seabird last collected in the mountains of eastern Jamaica in 1879, searched for over 10 days at sea in 2009 without one sighting, and still listed as critically endangered and possibly extinct
→ A flightless ibis about the size of a chicken, known from cave remains since 1977, with a wing that two scientists described in 2011 as radically different from that of all other birds
→ The bright red earth of Saint Ann, recorded in 1869 and exported as bauxite since 1952, where a 2009 US Geological Survey study of red soils on the north coast named dust from Africa and volcanic ash as possible sources
→ Rivers that vanish into the limestone hills of Saint Ann, in a basin sampled every month at 46 sites from March 2021 to July 2023, where the water did not come out at some of the springs the agency expected
→ A bright blue cloud of sediment photographed by a NASA satellite two days after Hurricane Melissa made landfall, visible across about 37,500 square kilometres, over a seabed where NASA says it is unknown how life will return
→ A die-off that travelled around most of the Jamaican coastline within about 8 weeks in 1983 and cut the Caribbean population of one sea urchin by about 98 percent, with a cause nobody identified
→ A mountainside in Saint Thomas that fell in 1692, where two published estimates of the fallen rock differ by a factor of about twenty or more
And at number one: the earthquake of 1692, which left part of old Port Royal under the water of Kingston Harbour. No one has been able to point to the fault that moved. A survey of the harbour floor published in 2019 described a previously unrecognized fault system less than 5 kilometres from Kingston, capable of an earthquake of magnitude 5.8 to 6.9, which is short of the magnitude 7.5 to 8 estimated for 1692. In 2022 a research ship collected 47 sediment cores holding 58 earthquake layers from the past 10,000 years, and the fault that sank Port Royal has still not been identified.
Subscribe for the next island, checked against the published record.
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
NASA Earth Observatory (13 January 2026) and the US National Hurricane Center, on Hurricane Melissa and Pedro Bank
BirdLife International Data Zone and Birds of the World (2023), on the Jamaican Petrel
Shirihai and colleagues, BirdLife and Tubenoses Project (2010), on the 2009 search at sea
Water Resources Authority of Jamaica, as reported by the Jamaica Information Service and the Jamaica Gleaner (September 2025), on the Rio Bueno study
Jamaica Bauxite Institute, on the history of bauxite in Jamaica
Peduzzi and colleagues, Environments 9(5), 62 (2022), on beach erosion at Negril
Jamaica Gleaner, Letter of the Day (7 October 2007), by a University of the West Indies geologist citing the geological reports of 1869 and 1924 on the Windsor spring
GeoExPro (6 December 2010), Wishart at the Stanford Geothermal Workshop (2013), and Barbados Today (4 November 2025), on the same spring
Longrich and Olson, Proceedings of the Royal Society B 278 (2011), with Yale University, BBC News and National Geographic reports (January 2011)
Muhs and Budahn, US Geological Survey, Quaternary International 196 (2009), on the red soils
Hughes and colleagues, Bulletin of Marine Science 36 (1985); Hughes, Science 265 (1994); Lessios, Annual Review of Marine Science (2016)
Hewson and colleagues, Science Advances (2023); Vilanova-Cuevas and Hewson, bioRxiv preprint (November 2025, not peer reviewed)
Petley, AGU Landslide Blog (15 July 2015), citing Maharaj (1994); Appalachian State University, citing Ahmad (1998) and Zans (1959)
Hornbach, University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (2009); Wright and colleagues, Tectonics 38(11) (2019); McHugh and colleagues, Geology 52(10) (2024)
#Jamaica #Unexplained #Science #Geology #Negril #BlueMountains #KingstonHarbour #JudgementCliff #Caribbean
Published Oct 11, 2026
