General Statement

Abstract

Subsurface sediment mobilization in SE Caribbean occurs in a context of plate boundary between the Caribbean plate and the South American plate, at the junction between the Barbados accretionary prism and the transform system of the northern Venezuela. Within this compressional and transpressional system, a several hundred kilometres-long active belt of mud volcanoes and shale diapirs develops from the Barbados tectonic wedge to the thrust belt of Northern Venezuela (Figure 1). In this system, the mud volcanoes of Trinidad and Venezuela are only the emerged part of a widely developed phenomenon in the offshore area of the Barbados prism (especially in its southern part). This has been notably spectacularly evidenced by the recent results of the CARAMBA survey of the O/V ATALANTE in 2002 (Figures 2 and 3). Structural Setting Mud domes and volcanoes developed in different structural settings (Biju-Duval et al.