next giant tsunami

[sereneorange]

For
all my paranoid friends

Scattered across the world’s oceans are
a handful of rare geological time-bombs. Once unleashed they create an
extraordinary phenomenon, a gigantic tidal wave, far bigger than any
normal tsunami, able to cross oceans and ravage countries on the other
side of the world. Only recently have scientists realised the next episode
is likely to begin at the Canary Islands, off North Africa, where a wall
of water will one day be created which will race across the entire
Atlantic ocean at the speed of a jet airliner to devastate the east coast
of the United States. America will have been struck by a
mega-tsunami.

Back in 1953 two geologists travelled to a remote bay
in Alaska looking for oil. They gradually realised that in the past the
bay had been struck by huge waves, and wondered what could have possibly
caused them. Five years later, they got their answer. In 1958 there was a
landslide, in which a towering cliff collapsed into the bay, creating a
wave half a kilometre high, higher than any skyscraper on Earth. The true
destructive potential of landslide-generated tsunami, which scientists
named "Mega-tsunami", suddenly began to be appreciated. If a
modest-sized landslide in Alaska could create a wave of this size, what
havoc could a really huge landslide cause?

Scientists now realise
that the greatest danger comes from large volcanic islands, which are
particularly prone to these massive landslides. Geologists began to look
for evidence of past landslides on the sea bed, and what they saw
astonished them. The sea floor around Hawaii, for instance, was covered
with the remains of millions of years’ worth of ancient landslides,
colossal in size.

But huge landslides and the mega-tsunami that they
cause are extremely rare - the last one happened 4,000 years ago on the
island of Réunion. The growing concern is that the ideal conditions for
just such a landslide - and consequent mega-tsunami - now exist on the
island of La Palma in the Canaries. In 1949 the southern volcano on the
island erupted. During the eruption an enormous crack appeared across one
side of the volcano, as the western half slipped a few metres towards the
Atlantic before stopping in its tracks. Although the volcano presents no
danger while it is quiescent, scientists believe the western flank will
give way completely during some future eruption on the summit of the
volcano. In other words, any time in the next few thousand years a huge
section of southern La Palma, weighing 500 thousand million tonnes, will
fall into the Atlantic ocean.

What will happen when the volcano on
La Palma collapses? Scientists predict that it will generate a wave that
will be almost inconceivably destructive, far bigger than anything ever
witnessed in modern times. It will surge across the entire Atlantic in a
matter of hours, engulfing the whole US east coast, sweeping away
everything in its path up to 20km inland. Boston would be hit first,
followed by New York, then all the way down the coast to Miami and the
Caribbean.

Comments

[mrama.livejournal.com]

That would be just my luck. We'd work so hard to move back east only to be wiped out by an African tidal wave. Hmph!