NOTES ON THE JAMAICA EARTHQUAKE 
MYRON L. FULLER 
United States Geological Survey, Washington, D. C. 
INTRODUCTION 
The following notes on the Jamaica earthquake are based upon 
observations made by the writer during a visit to Kingston in March, 
1907, and upon interviews with government officials and others who 
were present in the city at the time of the disaster. Special thanks 
are due to Mr. Robert Simmons, A. I. C., of the Government Labora- 
tories for information furnished, and to Mr. F. G. Clapp of the United 
States Geological Survey, who was associated with the writer in his 
studies and who has supplied several of the photographs accompany- 
ing the present paper. Owing to the shortness of the stay at Kings- 
ton the observations were of necessity somewhat limited, and no 
claim for completeness can be made, the object of the paper being 
simply to present some of the more important results of the earth- 
quake as observed by the writer or described to him by eye-witnesses. 
The city of Kingston is located on the south side of Jamaica, 
on the seaward edge of a large alluvial fan, occupying a V-shaped 
re-entrant in the mountains. In front of it is a spacious harbor, 
separated from the open sea by a long sand-spit, stretching west- 
ward for a distance of eight miles from the mainland, at a point about 
four miles southeast of the city. The relations are shown in Fig. 1. 
GEOLOGY 
The island of Jamaica consists essentially of an east-west core of 
metamorphosed Cretaceous shales, conglomerates, serpentine lime- 
stones, etc., standing at high angles and cut by granitic intrusions, 
surrounded by a narrow belt of younger and less disturbed Cretaceous 
sands, marls, and limestones, around which in turn is a wide belt 
of Eocene limestones, etc., with a few patches of Neocene around the 
edges. The structure is anticlinal, the trend of the uplift being 
from a little north of west to south of east. A considerable number 
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