Mar 142011
It is beyond words to describe the devastation in Japan. ABC News has a series of before and after shots that show the horrible devastation.
An event similar to this could happen here.
Help in whatever way you can or feel appropriate.
It is beyond words to describe the devastation in Japan. ABC News has a series of before and after shots that show the horrible devastation.
An event similar to this could happen here.
Help in whatever way you can or feel appropriate.
Perhaps some are unaware of the tsunami threat posed by the collapse into the Atlantic Ocean of the western half of a volcano on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. According to Dr. Simon Day, University College London, it is a question of when. Here is a quote from a Daily Express article dated 08/10/2004 by Ian Gurney, “A Wave of Destruction Will Destroy America’s East Coast:”
http://www.rense.com/general56/tsu.htm
“However, the destruction in the United Kingdom will be as nothing compared to the devastation reeked on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Dr. Day claims that the Mega Tsunami will generate a wave that will be inconceivably catastrophic. He says: “It will surge across the Atlantic at 500 miles per hour in less than seven hours, engulfing the whole US east coast with a wave almost two hundred feet high ” higher than Nelson,s Column ” sweeping away everything in its path up to 20 miles inland. Boston would be hit first, followed by New York, then all the way down the coast to Miami, the Caribbean and Brazil.” Millions would be killed, and as Dr. Day explains: “It’s not a question of “if” Cumbre Vieja collapses, it’s simply a question of “when”.
Pray, and row away from the rocks.
The only thing that can generate a tsunami wave 200 feet high, or greater, would be a meteor impact in the ocean. There is no way that the collapse of that volcano cone could do more than generate a surface wave, because the equivalent displacement of sea water would be minimal and only to a distance of a mile or two before dissipating.
It takes a LOT of displacement to generate a tsunami; the kind you only get from a mountain sized asteroid moving at hypersonic speeds.
Jonathan, you may be right, and I hope that you are right. I googled “canary island tsunami” and scanned some very technical articles that offer contrary estimates of the La Palma threat. It seems to my inexpert mind, that the weight of later research is skeptical about the height of the tsunami and the probability of its occurrence within ten thousand years. I hope they are right. Here is the transcript of the BBC documentary that was broadcast first on October 12, 2000.
Who knows which scientists are correct? As a note of caution, I recall a TV documentary about Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. The narrator remarked that professors from Caltech and MIT had doubts that the sound barrier could be broken. I will never live on a coast line of any major body of water.
Oops! Here is the link to the BBC documentary: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/mega_tsunami_transcript.shtml
I’ve seen that documentary about La Palma, and I think the danger is vastly exaggerated. Vastly. I think someone is looking for some funding or something. But, here’s the bottom line.
An avalanche of the magnitude described in the show on that gentle and lengthy slope would produce no great amount of kinetic energy on the downhill run. The billions of tons of rock estimated would… (continued)
(continued from above).. displace an equal amount of water moving at an equivalent amount of speed… certainly no more than 70 or 80 miles an hour on a good day. This would cause a fairly robust wave that would quickly dissipate its kinetic energy as it moved out into the vastness of the ocean. Really, it would have the effect of a pebble thrown into a lake. If the wave made it beyond 10 miles out, I would be surprised. There wouldn’t be enough kinetic energy.
(continued from above)… to really generate a megatsunami from a surface impact would require not so much mass as speed. Speed that simply can’t be generated naturally by anything on this planet. Only an asteroid could provide that much explosive kinetic force. A large enough asteroid would generate a wave thousands of feet high moving at hundreds of miles an hour. It would flood all land masses from coast to coast, most likely.