Scientists: Volcano Could Swamp U.s. With Mega-tsu

[britmaveric]

Scientists: Volcano Could Swamp U.S. with Mega-Tsunami By Daniel Flynn

MADRID (Reuters) - A wall of water up to 55 yards high crashing into the Atlantic seaboard of the United States, flattening everything in its path -- not a Hollywood movie but a dire prophecy by some British and U.S. academics.

As the international community struggles to aid victims of last month's devastating tsunami in southern Asia, scientists warn an eruption of a volcano in Spain's Canary Islands could unleash a "mega-tsunami" larger than any in recorded history.

According to their controversial study, an explosion of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma could send a chunk of rock twice the size of the Isle of Wight into the Atlantic at up to 220 miles an hour.

Many experts believe the risk of "mega-tsunamis" from such a massive landslide on La Palma has been hugely overstated.

But in the study's scenario, energy released would equal the electricity consumption of the United States for six months, sending gigantic tidal waves across the Atlantic at the speed of a jet plane.

Devastation in the United States would reach trillions of dollars with tens of millions of lives at risk. Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, Brazil, the Caribbean and West Africa would also be swamped by giant waves.

"It may occur in the next eruption, which could be next year, or ... it may be 10 eruptions down the line," said Bill McGuire of Britain's Benfield Hazard Research Center.

Cumbre Vieja, which last exploded in 1971, typically erupts at intervals of between 20 and 200 years.

"We just don't know when it will happen, but are people prepared to take the risk after the Indian Ocean events?" McGuire said, calling for a program to monitor the slide in Cumbre Vieja's flank.

"We need to get people out in advance of the collapse itself. Once the collapse has happened, the Caribbean would have 9 hours, the U.S. 6 to 12 hours to evacuate tens of millions of people," he said.

SCAREMONGERING?

Other experts say such predictions about La Palma or the Hawaiian volcano of Kilauea are grossly exaggerated.

The Tsunami Society, an international association of experts, dismisses such theories as "scaremongering." It argues Cumbre Vieja would not collapse in a single block and the wave generated would be much smaller.

"We are talking about thousands of years in the future. Anything could happen. An asteroid could also fall on earth," George Pararas-Carayannis, founder of the Tsunami Society, said.

Many wave experts believe tsunami from abrupt landslides dissipate more quickly than those generated by powerful earthquakes, like the Dec. 26 quake off Indonesia which stretched thousands of miles along the ocean floor.

Charles Mader, editor of the Science of Tsunami Hazards journal and an expert on wave modeling, predicts that even in the event of a massive landslide on La Palma the tsunami reaching North America would be no more than 1 meter high.

But McGuire stands by the wave modeling for the La Palma tsunami, carried out by Steven Ward of the University of California.

As the world reels from the Indian Ocean disaster, which killed more than 150,000 people, oceanographers and geologists agree the threat of tsunamis has been underestimated.

"It would not surprise me at all if tomorrow we saw another tsunami like this," said Pararas-Carayannis, pointing to faults off Portugal, Puerto Rico and Peru as possible risks.

For McGuire, a warning system in the Indian Ocean could have completely prevented loss of life in Sri Lanka and India from south Asian tsunami, as in most cases people would only have had to travel 1 kilometer inland to avoid the waves.

He ranks tsunami risk as second only to global warming in the hazards facing the planet.

"With coastlines massively built up now, particularly in developing countries, tsunami are a big problem because, unlike earthquakes, they transmit death and destruction across entire oceans," he said.

[LivinLOS]

There was a very good documentary on UK TV featureing this in the past.. May have been an 'Equinox' episode

[Richard W]

There was a very good documentary on UK TV featureing this in the past.. May have been an 'Equinox' episode

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It also made it into New Scientist. I don't remember any threat to Britain being mentioned. I came away with the impression that the biggest threat to Britain was of Lloyds' names being bankrupted en masse.

[LivinLOS]

No the docu was on the impact to the USA's western seaboard and the amount of devasation it would cause..

[The_Other_Mac]

As others have indicated, this story has been around for a while, in less scare-mongering form. None of the sources I heard from claimed there would be much impact back towards Europe, given the way the chunk of rock lies.

As I recall, the waves would be so extensive that only those who could fly out of the US Eastern seaboard would have time to escape, so public evacuation of the main cities wouldn't be possible. Which is presumably why they haven't bothered to install a tsunami early warning system in the Atlantic.

[britmaveric]

I caught last bit of the show on Satellite - apparently high speed landslides are what they are referring to with this mega tsunami. Apparently smth happened like this in Alaska - lake area in the 60's. I guess they are assuming the volcano in the Canaries might precipitate such a landslide causing massive tsunami heading towards eastern seaboard of yankland.

[andyadam]

It was on National geographic the other night, and in English!!!!!!

[cdnvic]

I still don't see what the point of it is though. Move NYC and other cities inland just in case?

cv

[chingy_]

let me see, Britain will move to the US, Spain and Portugal will move south, Brazil will move in-ward, West Africa will move across to Antarctic, Caribbean is most likely join south America, that leave France with no where to go, no other inner country want them, oh! well worthless anyway, let the boat sank, the East Coast of US will disapear, Bush will run to his Bunker in mid America. and all the hicks in mid America will never know what happen(either way East or West) .

West coast will continue on like nothing happen. atleast now Bill Gate will donate some money.

[aaaaaa]

that's what I'm talking about!

see article in this Forum :

The Scientific Perspective of TSUNAMIS

or read it here : The Scientific Perspective of TSUNAMIS - refer to part 1 of tghis PDF document if not interested in other prophetic insights of Parts 2 and 3....

[aaaaaa]

Global warming: Mountains face tsunami risk

Science - AFP

Sat, Feb 12, 2005

GRENOBLE, France, (AFP) - Mountain areas have long been recognised as being vulnerable to global warming, with rising temperatures damaging a fragile habitat for wildlife and threatening the future of low-altitude ski resorts.

Now, though, a further threat is starting to emerge: tsunamis.

The idea may sound bizarre. After all, killer waves are perceived as a threat to coastal communities, vulnerable to walls of water unleashed by giant earthquakes.

That was the case in the December 26 tsunami that scoured shorelines around the Indian Ocean, killing 284,000 people.

But European specialists say there is also a risk in the mountains, from huge lakes of meltwater that build up behind glaciers. If the icy barrier is breached, communities downhill are at risk of being swept away.

"In the Himalayas, some glaciers are up to 70 kilometers (43 miles) long," said Martin Beniston, a climate scientist at Freiburg University in Switzerland.

"In Bhutan alone, there are at least 50 lakes in this category, and a similar number in Nepal as well. Towns and villages in their path could be hit by a tsunami," he told AFP.

The unusual phenomenon came to light last October in France's Savoie region, says Christian Vincent, a research engineer at the Glaciology Laboratory in Grenoble.

A huge lake, five hectares (12 acres) across and 25 metres (81 feet) deep, formed at the back of the Rochemelon glacier at an altitude of 3,218 metres (10,450 feet), due to summer heat that had melted part of the glacier.

The discovery prompted the intervention of engineers, who decided to drain the lake to avoid the risk that the glacier wall could erode and then crack open.

A series of studies over the past five years has accumulated evidence that glaciers are in retreat in the Andes, the Alps in western Europe and the Himalayas, thanks not only to warmer temperatures but also shorter or less prolific seasons for snowfall.

The global benchmark is Austria's Pasterze glacier, whose length and volume are measured by a NASA (news - web sites) satellite.

A computer model of the Pasterze, devised by the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands on the basis of data sent back by the satellite, suggests that all of the glaciers in the Alps may disappear by 2080, according to Austrian specialist Heinz Slupetzky.

Chinese glacier expert Yao Tandong, director of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, last year said as much as 64 percent of China's high-altitude glaciers may vanish by 2050 if current warming trends continue.

Each year, its Himalayan glaciers shrink by an amount equivalent to all the water in the Yellow River, he said.

Glacier loss not only has an impact on tourist businesses that need a picture-postcard image for visitors.

Twenty-three percent of China's 1.3 billion people live in oases in the arid west of the country that ultimately depend on glacier runoff for their water.

Glaciers "are a capital in freshwater which is rapidly being exhausted," says Italian climatologist Luca Mercalli, president of the Italian Meteorological Society.

Global warming (news - web sites) is the term for rising temperatures on the Earth's surface, caused by "greenhouse" gases emitted by burning fossil fuels.

This pollution lingers in the atmosphere, trapping solar heat instead of letting it radiate back into space.

Since 1900, Earth's surface temperature has warmed by 0.7-0.8 C (1.26-1.44 F), and a rise of another 5 C (9 F) may occur by the end of the century if emissions are not braked.

The first treaty aimed at curbing greenhouse gases, the UN's Kyoto Protocol (news - web sites), enters force on Wednesday, but scientists say it falls way short of what is needed to tackle the problem.

[mffun]

There was a very good documentary on UK TV featureing this in the past.. May have been an 'Equinox' episode

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I saw one also, think it may have been on Discovery Channel. Something like 200 foot wave would be caused.

Latest I heard or read was that the USA was trying to work some way of blowing it up into small pieces. Must be possible I guess?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Headlines!!! Same move?

But I have same something for thinking!

Experts try to predict what next tsunami will do

Philip Liu of Cornell University in New York and several of his colleagues rushed to Sri Lanka after the Dec. 26 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Liu’s team had developed a computer model to predict how a quake might generate a tsunami and wanted to test it.

Such a system might be plugged in to an early warning network to help determine which quakes are likely to cause a tsunami, Liu said. The magnitude 9 earthquake off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra lifted the sea floor 15 feet (4.5 metres) and displaced trillions of gallons of water, inundating coastlines thousands of miles (km) away.

More than 300,000 people were killed or have disappeared. There were virtually no warnings, although in some instances it took hours for the giant waves to arrive.

Liu’s team wants to develop a quick way to measure a quake and plug the data into the model to predict whether and where a tsunami may hit in time to warn people. In the case of the Sumatra quake, the model showed it displacing a column of water both up and down.

It should, according to the model, have sent a trough first and then a wave in one direction, and a giant wave followed by a trough and then more waves in another. And that is what happened, Liu told a news conference organized by the Smithsonian Institution’s Smithsonian magazine.

While a “negative” wave went to Thailand, causing waters to recede before the wave hit, a “positive” wave hit parts of India and Sri Lanka, giving no warning before the waters rose.

Furthermore, the model showed the waves wrapping around the island of Sri Lanka, which also happened in December.

“You would think the (Colombo) region was protected,” Liu said, pointing to Sri Lanka’s capital on the west coast of the island, away from Indonesia. “But Colombo actually was affected.”

Looking into the past: Tsunamis are rare events and while Liu looked for eyewitness verification of his prediction methods, other scientists said they are forced sometimes to literally dig for clues.

Jody Bourgeois and colleagues at the University of Washington examined sediments left in Chile by a tsunami generated by a magnitude 9.5 quake in May 1960.

They visited the village of Mehuin, at the mouth of Rio Lingue in southern Chile. “People here knew to go to high ground,” she said. Only 40 were killed, although the tsunami turned what had been a village and farmers’ fields into a wide place in the river.

The villagers and farmers showed her where fields had been, and her team saw clear evidence of heavy deposits of dirt and sand washed over the area by the tsunami. Back home, they saw similar patterns in Washington’s Puget Sound and elsewhere. The Juan de Fuca plate off the Washington coast has a subduction zone, where one underwater plate slides under another, similar to the Sumatran zone.

As in Indonesia’s Aceh province, the tsunami from such a quake would arrive in just minutes. Earthquakes are not the only threat. James Luhr, a volcanologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, said Mount St. Helens, which erupted and collapsed in 1980, dumped 2.6 cubic km (.6 cubic miles) of ash, mud and rock on the surrounding area. California’s Mt Shasta deposited 46 cubic km (11 cubic miles) of material, changing the landscape in a way that can still be seen clearly 350,000 years later.

US Geological Survey sonographic scans show extensive areas around old underwater volcanoes near Hawaii and the Canary Islands off Africa that make Mt. Shasta’s deposits look tiny. Some contain up to 500 cubic km (120 cubic miles) of debris. Luckily, Luhr said, they only seem to occur every 125,000 years or so.

--- reuters

Edited February 14, 2005 by mffun