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| Went on a Carnival Cruise to Cozumel, where I scuba dived for the first time! |
Cozumel is an island in the Caribbean Sea off the eastern coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. The Yucatan is a karstic terrain. Karst is an area of irregular limestone in which erosion has produced fissures, sinkholes, underground streams, and caverns, all as a result of carbonation-solution. Marine calcareous sediments, also known as
limestone (See figures 1 & 2), make up the terrain of the Yucatan peninsula. Moreover, the peninsula is a tectonically stable platform whose current form was created by plates and faults during the early Cenozoic epoch.
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| Figure 1 - Cozumel Shoreline with limestone |
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| Figure 2 - Tufa limestone |
Cozumel Island is the emergent surface of a horst block (a table of land pushed upward between two normal fault lines - see figure 3 below) capped by 122,000 year old Pleistocene limestone.
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| Figure 3 - Horst block |
