Exploring Kick’em Jenny Submarine Volcano and the Barbados Cold Seep Province, Southern Lesser Antilles [in special issue: New Frontiers in Ocean Exploration: The E/V Nautilus 2014 Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Field Season]

The seafloor in the southern Lesser Antilles island arc is an area of active volcanism, cold seeps, and mud volcanoes (Figure 1). The Caribbean’s most active submarine volcano, Kick’em Jenny (KEJ), lying only 190 m below the surface, last erupted in 2001. The seafloor near Trinidad and Tobago hosts an extensive province of mud volcanoes and colds seeps that are generated by compression of fluid-rich marine sediments as the Atlantic plate subducts beneath the Caribbean plate in the forearc of the Lesser Antilles (Westbrook et al., 1983; Olu et al., 1996). During exploration with Nautilus in 2013, cold seeps were also discovered to the west of KEJ on a large debris avalanche deposit that extends to depths of more than 2,000 m (Carey et al., 2014). Their origin in this unusual geologic setting was attributed to overpressuring of subsurface fluids caused by the catastrophic collapse of the volcano and subsequent fluid movement downslope.