Port Royal, located at the mouth of Kingston Harbour, Jamaica, was once the biggest English colony in the New World, with a population of around 10,000. Much of its wealth came from pirates and privateers who attacked treasure ships heading back to Europe from the Spanish Main. The city's downfall came not from its loose morals but the fact that it was built on a sand spit (pictured right), less than a metre above the water table. When an earthquake struck the area just before noon on 7 June 1692, the tremors caused the sand to liquefy.

"Buildings that were once on a solid foundation are now sitting on a liquid," says Donny Hamilton, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University in College Station. "A building can drop 15 feet straight down without any of the bricks in the floor being displaced." Two-thirds of the city sank into the harbour, killing 2000 people that day.

Hamilton led a series of excavations at the site between 1981 and 1990. Eel grass now coats the harbour floor, overlaying a thick layer of dead coral deposited by a hurricane in 1744. This covered the buildings, preserving many of them intact - multi-storey brick houses and shops interspersed with shabbier earth constructions, which once lined bustling streets of sand.

Their contents reveal life as it was the moment the disaster hit. In one home, "we found stacks of pewter plates, iron skillets, charcoal in the hearth, knives, spoons and forks", says Hamilton. "And we found three children under the walls." Perhaps the most dramatic find at Port Royal, though, dates from an expedition in the 1960s: a pocket watch, its hands frozen at precisely 11:43 am. (New Scientist)