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The Coming Atlantic Mega-Tsunami
rbrander writes "It's not news at all that scientists predict an eventual "mega-tsunami" that will sweep across the Atlantic that will still be anything from 60 to 150 ft high when it hits the U.S. Eastern seaboard. This Old News, however, suddenly seems fresh. Like an asteroid hit, it could be millenia away, or tomorrow, that a volcano in the Canary Islands just off Africa drops half a trillion tons of rock into the Atlantic.
A short description of the problem from BBC News and some more graphic descriptions (of up to 100 million dead) and shrewd commentary on the politics of warning from journalist Gwynne Dyer."
... and here I just bought a bungalow on the Jersey shore.
isn't this a dupe?
At least in the Atlantic, we have an early warning system for Tsunamis and a well developed system of earthquake monitoring that would likely save many lives on the eastern seaboard. All of those expensive homes up on the coast though......
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
i live in ri.. the OCEAN state im screwed
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As anyone who's seen the video's of the Asian Tsunami at video.contemporaryinsanity.org knows, this is not a pleasant thing to contemplate...
libertarianswag.com
Might have something to do with that refurb ICBM in the previous post...
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Natural Disasters... they can happen at any time, in any place, and most of the time there is no warning.
Why the big hub-bub? They happen. Its part of living in this giant green and blue globe. Instead of freaking out and building ourselves fallout shelters, how about we all take time to donate time or effort into helping those that are in need from the last disaster?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Here's the Wiki link for a Megatsunami. Here's an excerpt:
"During an eruption that is anticipated to occur sometime within the next few thousand years the western half of the island, weighing perhaps 500 billion tonnes, will catastrophically slide into the ocean. This will inevitably generate a megatsunami which will travel across the Atlantic and strike the Caribbean and the Eastern American seaboard several hours later with a wave possibly 90 meters (300 feet) high, resulting in massive coastal devastation.
If we can't stop it and can't predict when it will happen, I say don't worry about it.
You could get killed by stepping on a candy-bar wrapper and falling down the stairs tomorrow, or die of old age at 95 years, or you could get killed by this giant tsunami. No sense worrying about it.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
"on a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
...to someplace like Kansas City.
On second thought, they can stay in Washington D.C.
Rhetoric:
Why is this news now? Why was this not news when it was first known? Why do most people only care about this as news in the wake of what happened.
Sorry for the double entendre.
This was in dan brown novel, so its obviously not true. ;)
seriously though, most of the current simulations show that the rock will probably break up before it hits the water, making the water displaced less dramatic. there's still a chance it could hit intact though, so more study is probably needed.
Moo.
Natural disasters that can affect the whole planet are known to scientists as "global geophysical events" -- gee-gees, for short -- and they come in two kinds: ones you might be able to do something useful about, and ones you can't. When governments are faced with the first kind, they can respond quite sensibly.
Yes, but when have we known the governments to respond sensibly about an upcoming major disaster?
wdd
You do realize that our nukes are in places like South Dakota, right?
There's some bad science in the post, especially the comment about the wave being 'still' that high. Most tsunamis are very small out in the ocean, most less then a few centimeters tall.
They don't get big until they approach the shore and the depth gets shallow.
The small waves, btw, travel around the speed of a jetliner, hence the lack of warning.
tsunami's this time of 32ft can already kill 100,000 people. if the tsunamis arrive without warning of up to 150ft, it might can wipe out north/south american east coast plus european/african west coast.
It's the end of the world! Repent and ye shall be saved!
Come on guys, with this doom and gloom bullcrap:
If these predicators of fear and loathing in America actually were worth a half a grain of salt, why didn't they see the Asian Tsunami / Earthquake ? Because they CANNOT BE PREDICTED. It's all predicated on history, and like baseball, you have no idea how many homeruns Bonds will hit next year. You won't know until it happens.
That's a fact.
If current trends in the likelyhood of natural disasters continue, the chance of this happening will probably be reduced to 1 in 500 million in 3 hours or so.
* Olaserov is in the process of thinking up a signature.
The coming eruption of the Yellowstone super volcano? Right now I'm on the east coast, so if I move inland and the volcano erupts, I'm screwed.
Gwynne Dyer is a sharp fellow (Canadian living in the UK). I have met him personally on a few occasions, he tends to have pretty reasonable insights into world politics. I'm not so sure how strong his science is, however. But from what I've seen from him over the years (Globe and Mail, etc.) he does not tend to seek to induce panic in people like many other journalists.
Florida will protect my home in Texas...
*sigh* in other news, my colon has anounced that a rather long and gaseous release is impending. possible shortages of toilet paper and fresh air may result.
nah. Can't be bothered to nuke/dig/TNT the top of the most unstable island bit by bit.
Out of site. Out of mind.
A blog I run for the wealth
Remember, according to the patriot act, water and rocks can be terrorists too!
Uh...hell no. How the shit is that post insightful?
There's only 300 million people in the US altogether. No way are 1/3 of them located within a couple kilometers of the East Coast. (Sure it hits non-US locations but also keep in mind that the death rate isn't 100% either.)
No WE is not ready.
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
It is possible that the east coast of Hawaii (the big island) couls also catastrophically slide off and generate a wave the wipes the entire West coast as well.
I guess Cape Breton Island isn't as safe as I thought it'd be.
Where are you going to go? If you're talking U.S., there's potential for bad things to happen no matter where you are. F5 tornadoes...hurricanes...Mt. St. Helens.
Then there's overseas, where unexpected things happen as well, such as this tsunami or sand storms in the Middle East. There's no reason to simply leave...the fact is that you'll die when it's your time. Period. Whether it's by a natural disaster, or cancer, or a car accident.
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
after seeing the images and videos of the waves rushing with no warning into Asian shores, all of a sudden the pictures from "Day After Tomorrow" become vivid of what might happen to New York City if a tsunami created from the center of the Atlantic arrive in the US eastern seaboard.
We know where the damned thing is, and can thus take counter measures.
I don't know about the rest of you, but these "Gee-Gees" give me the heebee-jeebies.
Now that everyones attention is on natural disasters rather than terrorism, let us take this opportunity to combine them....
Could a terrorist set off a bomb large enough to trigger the slide? Seems like this would be an easier target and do more damage than any nuke a typical terrorist could make.
It seems that nowadays the news has become entertainment instead of information. Journalists scurry to find ways to make The Next Big Headline (tm). Instead of finding ways to make people feel better or do something to help those that need it, they try to find ways to surprise and upset people- anything that will make people watch their channel or read their newspaper.
Now in the wake of a real natural disaster, all the journalists are hopping on the "tsunami disaster" bandwagon. They're thinking "how can I apply the fear from the disaster which just took place on the other side of the Earth to my own hometown? I bet that'll sell a lot of papers!"
Summary- there seems to be a big market for profiting from fear and doom 'n gloom predictions and not a very big market for helping people.
Imagine a terrorist organization that detonates a bomb in the fissure. It is the stuff movies are made about. (Indecentlally if you are a movie maker you can buy that idea off me) You'd nail every country you hate and then some. But the problem is it only works once, so it is not good for terrorism per se.
The solution is the same as the problem. I would fracture the land mass and incrementally slide it in to the ocean. Several planned tsunamis are better than one big unplanned one.
I do not know if it is possible, but with that death toll and desvistation, it looks like we should get some geologists down there to see if it can't be done. It is resy though, you don't want to trigger the whole thing. Perhaps, it could be divided horizontally to remove the downward stress, rather than splitting slices off vertically?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
So why is it being posted on a news website? I realise this has been brought to attention by recent events, but does it really need front page posting?
When will Slashdot have some News, instead of being just an RSS aggregator with commentary?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
... there go the blue states :(
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Isn't there a way to blow up that island in advance, so that the tsunami will be entirely predicted and planned? Like, put some explosives at several strategic places, and blow them up one at a time to divide the mega tsunami into many mini tsunamis.
It might be a REALLY long and REALLY expensive process, but the costs would be less than the casualties and enormous economical damages a tsunami would cause. How about using all those bombs for something useful, instead of dumping them on Iraqis?
you CAN do something about the canary island threat: shave the mountain away, bit by bit
the canary island threat is an above-water threat of fixed location, unlike the undersea, underearth, unseen, unlocated threat in the indian ocean, or the more usual suspects in the pacific ring of fire
it would be an enormous task, and cost billions, but after the deadly tsunami in asia, you can bet there might be some real interest in the possibility now
your fatalism makes sense about candy wrappers and death at age 95, but even you would go out of the way to not step on a candy wrapper, if you SAW IT at the top of the stairs, no?
well guess what: we see the canary islands, we don't have to fall down those stairs
therefore, your fatalism is an inappropriate response to the canary islands possibility
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So how long before the US government or Osama figures out that a nuclear bomb or (maybe) even a good chunk of high explosives trigering a landslide can be used as a weapon of mass destruction... a delivery system if you will?
Whoops. Quick delete this post before Osama reads it. Nah, his folks are just as smart as me.
You don't have to get close to the US with your big bomb... just send the wave across the sea. However I suspect that the power unleashed by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake is much larger than any inexpensive nuclear device they could lay their hands on.... but if a nuclear device could trigger a huge landslide.... well then.
Well.
Very interesting.
I feel pretty safe in Portland Oregon, possible erruptions of Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Hood aside.
But coastal Oregon and the Pacific region? The Atlantic seaboard?
Yikes.
I heard an interview with someone from NOAA with the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seatle that described what happens when a Tsunami occurs. He said when the wave travels through deep water it has tremendous speed (hundreds of mile/hour) but is only a few feet high. As it comes into shallow water the wave slows down to 10s of miles/hour and that causes the huge wall of water. So a Tsunami is not really a 100 ft wave as it travels through the ocean only once it nears land.
Just my $.02.
RTFA. No, we're not ready, because we choose not to be.
Paraphrasing the article:
A warning would result in the possibility of evacuating tens of millions of people for what could be weeks or months and maybe nothing will happen. Nobody wants to do that.
OTOH, nobody wants to get the warning, not order an evacuation, and be responsible for millions of deaths.
So the "smart" politician's winning game is to not set up the systems where there would be a warning. So there are not enough seismometers to know if there's something about to happen.
It sounds like no one could be ready - the wave would just be too big. All that could be hoped for is an evacuation, and we don't even have early warning systems in place for that.
What really worries me is the possibilities for a terrorist to place a small nuclear bomb there. With a small weapon, placed in a low-security location, a single act of terror could destroy New York, Washington, Boston, etc. - the entire eastern seaboard!
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
In the same vein as the Asteroid Simulator page (http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/), is there anything that can give us some ballpark figures on tsunami wave height and speed vs. distance for a given energy? (Like an Asteroid Strike?) Using 2004 MN4 as a sample, The Impact Simulator gives this value. "The crater opened in the water has a diameter of 5.41 km = 3.36 miles"
Can we use that to estimate a wave height at a given distance?
Also, if an impact we in the Indian Ocean, what effect would be seen in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, being narrow, shallow waterways? We all remember the "shotgun blast" from the Gulf of California in Lucifer's Hammer, now don't we?
If you're truly a bible thumper, you can know that no man can predict the ways of God. Unless of course God told you what would happen to tell others, like Jonah in Ninevah. It also says there shouldn't be any further prophets you should look for. God's calling people to help spread his word, but not for prophesy.
Check out my link, I have a nice logical explaination on how you can analyze the bible. Its good for scientists and tech people who don't buy into the pure faith argument.
God spoke to me.
Doomed! The megatsunami will hit us in a thousand years and we are doomed. DOOMED!!
You just send ballistic missiles confront the waves, and the moment they get to the tidal wave, make em explode and break the wave. seems simple enough to work.
AND you get to disarm whatever country's smart enough to care more about the lives of the citizens than the sparkle of their missiles.
This is my opinion. Everyone has a right to my opinion.
but if they're that worried about this, why not simply remove the volume of water surrounding the area by either creating an artificial island, or creating a group of enough aquatic piles and removing the seawater to such an extent that it wouldn't matter, or would severely reduce the height of the waves?
I know half a trillion tons of rock is a lot, but then so are a hundred million lives.
[goes into politics]
It would also divert money away from the US's more aggressive home defence foreign policies, which can't be a bad thing...
And if you want to keep a scary 'terror' paranoid perspective - I wonder what kind of airliner or ship would be required to give that mass of earth the correct nudge to cause a catastrophic mega-tsunami?
Baka Drew
Once again, I find myself quite happy that I live in Seattle. Sure, we're not disaster-proof, but we seem to be a lot safer than many other parts of the world...
You probably shouldn't click this.
Pfft ... spare us the details. Unless your colon can cause wide-spread devasta#@5%^ NO CARRIER
Can we think of something to stop those waves? I know that have tremendous amounts of energy. However, even a warning system won't do a lot of good if those waves slam into DC, NYC, and Boston. I wonder what the US Navy thinks of all this. A single disaster wiping out most of our Atlantic fleet would be disasterous.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
All of the sudden I'm feeling a little bit country.
It could not happen at all. The Canary Island volcano could just slowly slip into the sea, piece by piece, over centuries or millenia, and not come crashing down all at once.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It might also be possible to ease tectonic pressures under the Canaries by making some artificial volcanoes, or making some cuts in plates to give a little more elbow room, assuming those are practical things to try to do. This would push off the problem farther into the future.
But then if big projects like those are practical, maybe it'd be practical to set up some baffles in the water around the Canaries to break up the tsunami, and intentionally trigger it at a known time.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
The sad thing is , no one will listen until they are counting body bags...
Cruise TT
Because a disaster can happen at any time, I never wear a seatbelt or install smoke alarms plus I make sure to always wear loose clothing near my tablesaw and run with scissors.
Somerville, MA. Union Sq area. Good deal on valuable two-family property. Get a leg up on your neighbors and "lease to own". $475K!!!
Me and my surfboard are ready.
that's too american. not 'jihad' enough. no suicides involved.
...all cock-blockery aside...
Whatever it is, we'll just fucking send in the Marines and they'll take care of it!
"Please Note: I shall be using double quotation marks in all cases from now on, as single quotation marks tend to vanish in almost every e-mail program known to man."
I can't think of ONE email program that would behave that way!
It's good for the economy! Poor people will be hit the hardest, except for the mega-rich and thier beachfront properties, of course. That means with more of the poor wiped out, less welfare to pay. Which will be good, because the tax base will shrink, too.
Then they'll also be all the work to clean up, bury the bodies, rebuild, etc. No more unemployment! At that point, will be asking the surviving Mexicans to wade the Rio Grande to help out!
And just think of all the ways we can rebuild those antiquated, overcrowded, old costal cities into vibrant, new, spacious cities!
Did I mention I'm in real estate?
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
all washed up...
They won't do it for the same reason they don't seed clouds to try to prevent hurricanes anymore: liability. If they do it and fail, or trigger a disaster, there will be hell to pay.
Because everyone decided to not worry about an Indian Ocean tsunami
h tm l?tid=99&tid=1
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/12/28/0120240.s
Uh, actually, plenty of people worried. Arthur C Clarke was there researching the possibility.
--
The purpose of Project Warn is combine enhanced communications and IT systems to provide warning of impending natural or man-made disasters and to provide on-going communications and remote sensing and GIS support during disaster relief operations. The Clarke Foundation is working with the Pacific Disaster Center, the Asian Disaster Mitigation Organization, the United Nations, and the US and Japanese Governments as coordinated through the JUSTSAP organization to carry out a suitable test and demonstration in this area.In particular a simulation and test is being planned in the Pacific Region in 2005 to determine to how to use the latest information and sensing technology more effectively in the advent of that a major Tsunami might impact an Asian country or island. Clarke Foundation personnel are providing technical advice and support on a volunteer basis to this project.
--
Too late though.
no
For god's sake man - everyone is worried about the terrorists! The terrorists should be the first thing on everyone's mind! Nothing is more likely to kill you than a terrorist! With small nuclear bombs! That they made in the backseat of their taxis! While they infiltrated your hometown! And fucked the little children in an attempt to please Allah! And other associated retarded stuff! Terror!
I would focus nuclear weapons research on the feasability of anti-matter dopes super-large thermonuclear explosions. I would then build a large facility on the island to construct and shelter an array of 100+ mega ton "gadgets" and then fire them in concert in such a way as to blow the top of the volcano skyward, and fuse as much of the loose rock underneath as possible. Leaving an atoll. Then I would make sure everyone downwind takes their calcium and iodine supplements, and trying to choose a time such that the prevailing winds are blowing over poor people who can't bother me.
While it's all well and good to look to the future, and try to learn from the mistakes of the past, people need help now. The death toll (according to the new york times 12/29/2004 11:36PST) is 70,000.
Please consider packing a lunch next monday and donating $10 to the Red Cross.
A Brave from the Yakima Indian Nation I once knew: "Bring it on, it will level the playing field."
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I've seen what rock mines can do to a mountain. Give the miners a few years and they can dismantle the volcano piece by piece.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Don't advertise it!
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
An asteroid? http://technotoxin.blogspot.com/2004/12/indian-oce an-tsunami-asteroid.html
Are doomed to re-watch it.
Imagine a terrorist organization that detonates a bomb in the fissure. It is the stuff movies are made about.
Sounds almost like an atomic bomb in the san andreas fault.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
damage in Ireland (and presumably Britain) will be minor. Portugal, Spain and Africa aren't even mentioned.
you've never been to New Jersey. Had you, the feeling wouldn't be sudden. Parts of it are like a third world country, and then there are the bad neighborhoods....
I've actually studied La Palma and the possibility of a "landslide" causing a mega-tsunami. In my research i've found that it is a very touchy subject, with 50% of geologists putting forth a "world is going to end" theory and 50% saying how it cant possibly move that fast and the conditions are not right for it to occur the way the doomsdayers say it will. Both have strong evidence to back it, i tend to side with the non-doomsdayers because, i live on Long Island at about 25' above sea level and 5 miles from the ocean. Good news is that even with a 50-75 foot tidal wave, it can only penetrate into land about 6 miles, depending on the land topography, and we will have about 8 hours warning. so we are ok. :-D
When it comes, the dept. of Homeland Security will be right there to inform worried Americans that the Tsunami will unlikely be terror related ;)
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
surfing USA... or for the german-speaking out there: Das ist die perfekte Welle!
www.weberseite.at
Witness the failures of moderation! Come on, ths is not a troll. It's OFFTOPIC. looks like a decent recipe, too. We have enough problems with too many moderation options, if an appropriate option exists, choose it.
Blue Stae.
However, as noted by the BBC article on this subject some people are saying that the island would more likley break apart in pieces, as it seemingly has before in the past - thus not causing nearly the same degree of destruction.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This PDF shows the movement based upon the simulation on page 3
l .p df
http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~ward/papers/La_Palma_gr
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
Speaking rather selfishly, this possibility was actually mentioned when we moved from 180ft to 1000 ft above sea level here in Massachusetts. The reason was cheap real estate but elevation does have its advantages.
I had this crazy visual of standing on Belmont Hill overlooking Boston when the wave hit and then realizing it wasn't high enough.
He should plant it on this island, and not in DC?
Now I can change my
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If this were an audio blog, you'd here a "sizzle" in the background.
It's pretty clear that TPTB did a poor job of preparing for this one. Of course, you'd expect someone like Clarke to be ahead of the curve.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
"The western flank of Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma in the Canaries is going to slide into the Atlantic one of these days: a diagonal fracture has already separated it from the main body of the volcano, and only friction still keeps it attached."
I wonder if some terrorists located in Northern Africa might get the idea to use dynamite to forcibly dislodge the western flank. That would suck.
I hope the US gubmint is contemplating ways to prevent this. I think he should invade Canary.
Ocean front property in North carolina. From my front porch you can see the sea...oh hell... is that what I think it is?
And I, for one, welcome our new aquarian overlords...
2. Use your brain.
The paragraph your referring to says this:
So it says 100 million dead +/- 50 million, assuming no evacuations. Nowhere does it say those are all US citizens - in fact it pointedly makes reference to islands in the Carribean - so how do you manage to make such a ridiculous leap of logic and assume that it's only talking about US fatalities?
I don't know what's worse: the morons who posted complete crap in the original story ("they chose to live there", "it's karma coming round for all those tech jobs going to India", "Oh, there's a natural disaster affecting millions; is Arthur C Clarke OK?") or your assumption that the only nation that would be affected by a catastrophic event of this nature in the Atlantic Ocean would be the US.
(You do realise that you're talking about an event that would hurt the US but totally annihilate those island nations in the Atlantic, right? That there would still be plenty of the US left untouched but places like the Bahamas would be most probably be wiped out completely? And that, while we're debating this hypothetical, people around the Indian Ocean are living through and dying from the real deal?)
Seriously, some people here need their heads examined. The amount of narcissism, myopia and even xenophobia that I've seen attached to the tsunami-related stories here on Slashdot beggars belief.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The BBC also reported in October this year that another group felt the story was over-hyped
Doubt there would be false alarms. The early warning system would detect a tsunami en route, they take 9 or 10 hours to reach the coast. If it sounds, you'd best get out, and there's little chance of it not happening afterward. The real question, is how you could possibly evacuate 100 million people in that amount of time.
These smart politicians regularly spend on up to 8 figure sums on pork, but a working early warning system could be put in place for half that. It's basically chump change, but just as the rich guy refuses to give a beggar 50 cents, the government wants to ignore this threat.
Now who's the moron?
The documentary is available on the E2DK network at Video - Discovery.Channel-The.Mega.Tsunami.XviD.[TeeVee]
When I first heard of this on the Discovery Channel, I was thrilled. Ever since, when I listen to Tool's Aenema, I think of this future event and do the closest thing to praying that an athiest can do that I will live to see this event. The US, now more than ever, needs to be humbled, and this, aside from the supervolcano under Yellowstone, is the best chance we have.
Oh, and the thing that makes me the most happy - there will be an estimated 8 hours from the initial island collapse to impact on the North American coast. How many people will be able to be told, and how many people will believe? And of those that believe, how many will have the time needed to leave?
"Manhandled" meaning men using machines, of course. We already routinely move millions of tons of earth and rock around every year, so doing something about LaPalma (and there's another big fracture on Hawaii waiting to dump into the Pacific) IS possible.
First, we drill hundreds of cores from the surface THROUGH the slippage fault and insert temporary steel beams. This holds ("pins") the overall mass in place.
Second, starting at both side-edges of the loose region, we start removing the beams and digging up the material and dumping it into the sea. (Or, if we trust the "pins" enough, we can use explosives for this part.) Each dump is thus just a tiny tiny landslide, and after enough have been done (after a few years, probably), there will be nothing left to cause a disaster. Yes, a fair part of the work may require underwater equipment. So? Different tasks in different places require different machines. Nothing new there.
I wanna watch the insurance agents sweat, shake and cry to the feds that they can't pay all the claims that they've underwritten when the mega-tsunami hits. They love taking money, but hell has to freeze over before they'll part with it!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You've entirely missed the point. You can't anticipate every possible occurence.
We can put tsunami warning systems on every coastline in the world and they wont do us any good when a huge meteor hits the earth.
Or we can dedicate the entire resources of the planet for the next 20 years to building a system that will protect us from earth destroying meteors. And then a series of catastrophic 9.0+ earthquakes at every major fault-line on the planet will wipe us out (only our super high-tech orbital defense satelites will remain)
Or something else will happen that we didn't and couldn't anticipate (Vogons).
The universe is wild and wooly. It doesn't knock, it doesn't ask politely. It does whatever it wants and the survivors (if there are any) pick up the pieces when its done.
"Why worry?" might be a little too strong. More like, "Don't panic."
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
"I feel pretty safe in Portland Oregon, possible erruptions of Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Hood aside."
I guess you don't know about the Hanford reservation, or the Chemical Weapons Storage at Umatilla, or the fault line which runs right through the West Hills, then...
Lame. Come on, people. Let's take a look at this with a critical eye before everyone panicks. You post a BBC article from 2000? The BBC ran a more recent article with more recent findings.
Tidal wave thread 'over-hyped'
Summary: Evidence suggests slides on the Canary Islands to happen in small, incremental slides. The huge collapse is sensationalism and the absolute "worst-case scenario"
this erupts:
Yellowstone
The end of the US as we know it.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
As other posters have correctly noted, a tsunami's surface wave form in deep water is very slight, probably imperceivable against the naturally occurring 'chop'.
It only becomes a huge wave when it approached shore, where the shallow water forces the wave's energy above the surface.
With warning, naval vessels could all be far enough from the coastline to render the tsunami harmless.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Is here:3 963563. stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/
A little bit less alarmist, but still doesn't sound good. A lot more recent, too.
Sacrafices must be made... for the greater good. Mu ha ha ha ha...
Would we have seen 10s of thousands of deaths? Yes, hurricaines are predictable, but predictions are only useful if mass evacuations are planned/executed.
It strikes me that the reason SE Asia has so many deaths isn't so much the power of the event, it's that they have so many people living in shacks at about sea level. Which means that ANY surge of sea water will cause massive problems from flooding.
George Bush will declare War on Mother Nature.
Oh wait!
That's a three foot wave hitting the U.S. Eastern seaboard after a worst case collapse at La Palma. The paper is very detailed and worth a read.
Benfield Hazard Research Centre Tsunami Pages. Click on the last article there.
The most interesting part IMO:
So just give these people some money, ok?
A pdf about tsunamis in the Atlanic. Link
And off course the pics. Link
6 hours+. Plenty of time to evacuate a lot of people. If they A. know about the danger a from through media and B. a reasonably updtated tsunami warning system.Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Hey, fucktard! This happened in the Indian Ocean, not the Pacific. Asia happens to touch more than one piece of water.
No one worried.
It's awfully difficult to do things in the United States, but one has to wonder what sort of things would be required to artificially set this off.. I understand that a volcano has a lot of energy, but I don't think that nuclear weapons are totally out of the question. IMO, the real question is whether you would be able to position a large explosion to cause this slide to happen.
I keep forgetting my place. Jesus is for losers. Why do I still play to the crowd?
See following link for a 2001 scientific paper from a Univ. California and Univ. College London geologists regarding La Palma collapse and resulting tsunami: http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~ward/papers/La_Palma_grl.p df
How long do you think it would take for this thing to rescind? Could I close myself in a bank vault and not run out of air before it rescinds?
As a resident of the Baltimore/DC area, I have to debate the assumption that Baltimore and Washington will be completely destroyed. Both are considered "coastal" cities but Baltimore is a good 30 miles at minimum from the ocean, the tsunami would have to travel the length of the Chesapeake Bay to reach it and the entrance to the bay is pretty safely guarded by land (close to where I live, I'd be a goner...) Washington would be somewhat more suceptable, but I imagine the Eastern shore of Maryland would be hardest hit. Even a tsunami like the one in Asia recently would absolutely destroy, say Ocean City but would leave Balimore untouched and most likely only minor damage to DC.
Come on, 100M give or take 50M... what kind of statistic is that??
The article says that the giant tsunami would take out the east coast up to 20km inland. Then it goes on to list Philadelphia as a city that will be wiped out. Philadelphia is over 100km inland! Unless the tsunami travels up the Delaware River, I think we'll be ok.
What about the possibility of someone intentionally causing the collapse of the volcano?
Here is another news source on the mega-tsunami . And, if you think you are better off living in Idaho or Montana or something like that, don't be so smug, Yellowstone may kill you there.
We might be able to use multiple underground nuclear explosions to cause a series of small landslides. This could remove the threat (i.e the whole side of the mountain) piece by piece with no single wave large enough to cause a disaster.
there has to be a creative solution to the problem. it would probably involve either a really big explosive device, lasers, or a combination of the two.
for example, tunnel an atomic bomb under the volcano. strong ties to the mole men would be useful here, and therefore i suggest applying points to your diplomacy tree.
the detonation of the bomb would force the mass upwards. then your crack team of trained dolphins with fin-mounted lasers can cut up the falling mountain fragments.
you could use frickin' sharks, but dolphins are easier to both train and feed.
Next thing you know, they'll start making movies capitalizing on these natural disasters, like maybe a tsunami hitting New York City. oh, wait...
wait - a tsunami caused by rock splashing into the water? That wouldn't displace the ENTIRE water column from bed to surface the way the earthquake did. Why would this "invariably" cause a tsunami that could reach across the Atlantic? The amount of energy released in the earthquake was orders of magnitude higher because it was the potential energy of entire tectonic plates - a big island, even a efw billion tons of rock, isn't anywhere near massive enough to release that much raw energy. Propagating a wave across the Atlantic will take a lot more energy than propagating one across the Bay of Bengal.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
an attack of a very big cisco aironet accesspoint ssid in its default configuration? killing all and sparing none with all its insecureness
I must admit this crossed my mind given the current political climate. After all, the "spectacular attack" of 9/11 involved leveraging not one but two "things" against each other for multiplicative effect - don't just crash planes, crash them into heavily populated buildings. What would happen if, rather than unleash a WMD on a coastal city, he were to drop it in the Atlantic several hundred miles offshore?
Why hasn't anyone thought about this????
Not only would we not have to evacuate anyone, but the seismologists wouldn't shit their pants, the coastal habitants would be happy (myself in FL included), the news people would be sad that they don't have a catastrophe to bring in the ratings, and we could live life as normal.
Oh yeah, and those Canary Islands people would probably like this idea...
Hahaha! You just made me laugh aloud. Good job.
Just don't forget that amongst the hillbillies, there's plenty of naive but oh-so-horny cornpone country pussy...
At any rate, all scientists are predicting this massive tsunami? Wow, I remember reading just a few months ago that some scientists believed that it was unlikely a massive tsunami would occur from that island group because the landslide wouldn't occur all at once. In fact, I remember reading a new story about that just yesterday stating the same thing.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
He calls it War on Nature! The mother-nature bitch has been killing of innocent god-believing tax-paying americans for YEARS. Millions of 'em! Now it's time to make her pay! No more mr preserving-the-nature nice-guy. More pollution, more air waste, and kill off all terrorist recyclers!
Well, I think I'm sitting pretty nice here in Seattle. We've got the whole Olympic peninsula to deflect and absorb tsunmanis, and the (relatively) small passage leading into the Puget Sound would mean that only a small section of a wave would get in, and it would be bounced around so many times before it got anywhere near the Seattle area that noting more than a slight tidal increase would occur. However, I shouldn't lord it over everyone else cause one of these days we'll get our own little 9.0+ earthquake, and that will probably be as bad as (or worse than) any tsunami wave. Oh well... there are not very many places on Earth that are free from natural disasters - and those places are not very fun to live in for other reasons, I imagine. Thats life :)
William George
Living in Vancouver, we are protected by Vancouver Island which is a natural barrier against any mega tsunami. I live near the Burrard Inlet, which pours out into the Pacific Ocean, so we get all the benefits of living near shores and beaches, and afforded the protection of natural barriers.
by carry off the offending part of the volcano?
Wouldn't that be cheaper?
-Max
I've wondered for years why the US government isn't taking precautions to prevent some terrorist group from using a small nuke to blow that side of the island off. They seriously need to take precautions on that one. The worst case scenario think tanks in the covert goverment agencies seem to have totally missed this one.
I wouldn't mind being in one of those think tanks, I have a twisted enough imagination to think up things like this but not evil enough to act on them. When a friend and I get together to work on story ideas, we can be really scary. He scared a forensics specialist once with a story idea.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Actually, I would think the "smart" politician would want to set up a warning system to at least get himself out of the way... last time I checked, Washington D.C. was located awfully close to the eastern shoreline of the US.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
We're all DOOOOMED!
This is what the real experts think about this. The topic of the mega-tsunami is at the end of the FAQ. So
read it and learn something.
Note that one could point to a lot of active oceanic volcanoes and pose a similar threat level if one considers a tens of thousand of years time frame.
Another side note: When I was in grad school, I was the TA for one of the committee members.
Remove the rock that is going to slide and place it as a break water around the side that will collapse. Once in place, if what's left collapses, you get a big splash, and fill in the breakwater with new crop lands.
O. H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory
I live just over the 20KM limit. My property will be beach front!
Riiight
What you propose would be very difficult at best.. nuclear weapons would have to be used (its not the first time someone thought that a nuclear weapon would make a great earth works tool - see the plans to use nuclear weapons to build a canal)
there is another way that makes more sense.. off shore a certain distance you can build artificial islands out of material from the volcanos.. this is not the same thing as just dismantling it because each piece you take off does double duty (you cant take it all off, but each load you do can be used to liimit whats left). the distance would have to be calculated..
without something nearby and in front, the slide causes the maximum wave.. but if there are things in front close enough but not too close.. the amounts of water that can be part of the initial flow would be very limited and therefore have a very hard time transferring the energy from the volcano to the water. if this happened on land.. it would cause an earthquake and a wicked debris flow... and thats it.. a big mess but not the reach.. its that the wall drops into water unhindered..
putting the islands too close would cause them to be part of the flow... while slowing it a bit.
now before you say you cant build an island.. well.. talk to the japanese.. they have done it and there are more coming...
Points of reference.
Massachusetts is due west of Northern Spain
North Carolina is due west of the Canary Islands
The Bahamas are between Southern Florida and the Canary Islands
Washington DC is protected by the DelMaVa penisula to the east
Manhattan is tucked inside NY Harbour, and is further protected by Long Island
Cape Cod protects Boston
Much of Rhode Island is protected by Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard
The Barrier Island protect much of the Carolina mainland
Bottom line, there are islands, etc can be counted on to diminish the effect of the tsunamis. You can expect some surge to reach DC and NYC. But nothing like a direct hit.
But if the tsunamis are really big, they still might wash right over the smaller islands. Even a really big wave will only travel a mile or so inland, last I checked. YMMV
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Sounds like an awful lot of worst-case assumptions. Sounds like bad scientific public relations. Sounds like a crock.
Its a truely beautiful island, one of the few of the Canaries not messed up by development/tourism. Its still retains a lot of its original forests, including its own unique species of pine, and the volcano in the center is awesome - the second largest in the world, I understand. I remember the vivid impossible looking & unscalable peaks - they do look like a strong wind could blow them into the Atlantic.
As for the Tsunami it is hard to know what can be done - I suppose a system of alarms and planned evacuations could help.
All the same, I would say to anyone that it is worth a visit..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
www.clusterballoon.org/learning/learning.htm
All that's needed is technology available now, sufficient to evacuate everyone in the area vertically -- UP about 1,000 feet -- for about three or four hours.
Set the distribution equipment up - harnesses are simply nylon webbing; rent time on them meanwhile for recreational purposes, and it'll pay for itself before it's needed.
Also useful for evacuating high-rise buildings.
And helium's being wasted now, in gas flared off from oil wells -- it'll make a market if we need a few storage tanks per city block, not to mention the other uses that can be made of helium if it's easily available.
I say, as soon as the alert warning goes off, we set off tactical nukes across the entire coastline and kill ourselves because, hey, f' you mother nature.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
PLEASE!
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Fires occur most anywhere due to morons.. ( and lightning storms ).
Earthquakes even occur in the midwest US.. While the likelyhood might be less in some areas, no one is really 100% safe from them, unless you move to the moon..
So we goto the desert.. Dont forget dust storms due to drought..
Then you got neighbors... They are really hard to predict..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
PLEASE!...
The last thing we need is for SPECTRE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
or Dr. EVIL (TM)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Evil
To get ideas on where to detonate the NUKE....
Hmm...I guess it would make a good Bond flick plotline
Shouldn't we be protecting this island like a miltary base? I mean, if all it takes is some tremors to set it lose, you think that soem terrorists would be all over that. Ug.. I would hate to think about that.
Fine, then. Let's still plan for the worst case and hope for the best case.
It would be equally as bad to plan for the best case as to not plan at all.
Think of the big Kobe earthquake and building damage done there. Building code for quite some time was that the first 7 stories of a building had to be earthquake resistant. Well, lots and lots of buildings in Kobe exceeded this. Maybe 10-12 stories, but enough. "It couldn't be any worse than what has happened before." Ooops.
Of course, the Krakatoa eruption did not result in tsunamis on the west coast of the US, either (if it would have been possible), but there was significant tsunami damage in Hawaii done from a large Alaskan earthquake in the 50's. Sure, some of that was just dumb luck: funnel-shaped bay facing the same direction the tsunami waves were coming from in Hilo.
Besides, what would a 3-meter high tsunami do if it hit somewhere like Fundy at high tide? You know, somehow I think that a place that has 40-foot tide swings just might have problems even with a depleted tsunami wave.
Isn't the problem really one of the big wavelength waves hitting the Continental Shelf suddenly turning into really tall waves?
"a tourist said that she was surprised that after the waves, the area where she was staying no longer stank of sewage."
The article is fresh in my mind. The tourist in question was remarking about how clean the airplane smelled once she was able to leave the devastated area, which was awash in dead bodies and sewage.
I'd provide the link, but the keep updating the content often enough that it would probably be out of date the moment I posted it due to edits.
"an eventual "mega-tsunami" that will sweep across the Atlantic that will still be anything from 60 to 150 ft high when it hits the U.S. Eastern seaboard"
Uh, STILL? Dumbass, tsunamis aren't discernable as they travel across the deep ocean. It's only when they approach shallower waters that they rise up.
the "more graphic description" gives a death toll of up to 150 million dead not 100 million as stated in the post.
If you are out in the deep water on a boat you might not even notice the wave passing under you. It would only lift your boat a few feet and it would do it gently. As that water heads towards shore though, the mass of water has nowhere else to go so it goes up onto land.
Damn you terrorist island. I ain't going to take it anymore.
First we get attacked by some Saudi moron, than we get harassed as the cops close the streets at random, than they take my picture and check my papers while driving around town, than all the metal detectors as if every door were an airport. After all that, some punk island wants to pick a fight with DC.
Nuke the bastard.
I'm not saying that a tsunami wouldn't be bad news for the East Coast I'm just saying that it's less likely to cause the mass damage than pacific and Indian tsunamis for one simple reason. On the East Coast the continental shelf extends fair far out and would rob an approaching wave of much of its energy.
"Technology.....the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Max Firsch
The natives call the enterprise to drill into the planet's surface with the ships phasers to release the planet's tectonic pressure but as a result a cloud of volcanic ash covers the planet.
All the while some cooky guy in circa 1960's hemp clothing, who says he's from the future, keeps stealing tricorders.
You are absolutely right; however, I think the author of the article wanted to point out that even over such a massive distance, the build-up of the wave when it approaches North America will still result in a damn big wave. I didn't see him suggesting the wave to be this big in the middle of the ocean.
The western flank of Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma in the Canaries is going to slide into the Atlantic one of these days: a diagonal fracture has already separated it from the main body of the volcano, and only friction still keeps it attached.
If it's just sitting there, waiting to fall into the ocean (with catastrophic results), why don't we start disassembling it now? There's got to be a safe way to slowly rip it apart and reduce the potential risk.
If not nuclear bombs, then TNT, or jackhammers. Whatever. Just rip it apart and throw it into the ocean piece by piece, safely.
If there's any truly useful area for robots, this is it. Send a whole fleet of robots up there armed with pickaxes, to reduce the mountain to dust and rubble, slowly, over the course of a couple decades or longer.
If one foundation can build the Craze Horse Memorial over a time frame of 65 years (and counting!), surely this is possible.
Software Wars
70-100k+ are dead and you are talking not about what can be done to help (indeed, on a site like Slashdot there might be some good conversation on that topic after the first wave of trolling) but instead you're talking about "what if it happens here?" Are you people insane!?
How about "I drowned because I tried to pick up some of the fish that washed up after the first wave, so I won't be around for that mega-tsunami you're talking about, you insensitive clod."
WARNING: DO NOT LET DR. MARIO TOUCH YOUR GENITALS. HE IS NOT A REAL DOCTOR.
I live in Los Angeles and don't have cable. As soon as I heard about the tsunami, I switched the TV on.
;-)
Soaps, Chat Shows, blah blah blah. I didn't see anything on the local channels until the evening news!
And then, when I did, the news focussed almost exclusively on how it affected US (sic). For me, the worst comment was actually on PBS (of all places). Admittedly, it was "World Business Report" (or something like that). I caught a glimpse of a top ranking Sri-Lankan being interviewed, and the interviewer asked something along the lines of, "Sri Lanka makes a lot of clothing for the US market - for example, a lot of Victoria's Secrets' items are manufactured there. Do you think this disaster will affect your country's export ability?"
I mean, fuck. That to me is in such bad taste I'm surprised the guy didn't just punch him and walk out.
It would be like saying to Mayor Giuliani on September 12th, 2001, "So, the twin towers ran a lot of the world's banking services. How do you think this destruction is going to affect The UK's merchant banks?".
I mean, wtf???"
To restore my sanity, I went to http://news.bbc.co.uk for an in depth view.
God I miss real news TV sometimes. Anyone know how I can get the BBC's Newsnight in high quality through my DSL in LA?
cLive
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Agreed, let's RTFA... the risk is real but let's always not lose perspective
6. Should I be worried by mega-tsunami?
As an individual, you have much more chance of being killed in a car accident than by a mega-tsunami. Mega-tsunami are very rare. However, it is important for governments to understand the potential risk, so that they can decide what hazard preparations, if any, are required.
I will probably re-encode these to MPEG1 and re-upload.
clicky
I used to have a sticker that (sheerly because I was being nasty to tailgaters) said "Save the Planet, Kill Yourself"
Sure enough, I had a number of people complement me on my environmental awareness...
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Ok, this is wholly off-topic and utterly pedandic of me, but it's the Isle of Mann, not Man.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In Russia we would solve the problem quickly.
First we will put a lot of bombs on the volcano.
Then we would evacuate the coast. Then blow the volcano.
The country will be devastated but it will save
for the next thousands of years.
"Don't take life too seriously, you'll never make it out alive "
"There is only a one in six billion chance that you actually exist"
Well, let's see: Mt. St. Helens is only a problem in a small part of Washington State. Tornadoes, well, yeah, that takes out most of the Midwest, and hurricanes can hit FL, AL, GA, LA, SC, NC and MS pretty darn hard. You didn't mention the following, but: earthquakes are only a serious problem (to my knowledge) in western California. The potential tidal wave is only a problem for a few miles inland on the East Coast.
That still leaves the Rockies, the Appalachians, right around the Great Lakes, and, my personal favourite, the inland Northeast, at the very least.
Man, I'd hate to be as pessimistic as you.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I suppose it would be bad form to link to the BBC article Tidal wave threat 'over-hyped'. Apparently not everyone in the geological research community thinks there's much to this theory.
Sigs? Sigs? We don't need no steenkin' sigs.
Love the up-to-dateness of the article, linking to a BBC program which was aired on BBC Two, 9.30pm, 12 October 2000
The Cascadia subduction zone, off of the Pacific Northwest region of the US, has a potential very similar to the one that just quaked in Sumatra. In recent history it seems to have quaked about every 400-600 years, with the last one being about 305 years ago. You can read about it here.
Exactly how loose is this giant slab of rock (I couldn't find any pictures). Is it a real possibility that terrorists could dislodge it with high explosives?
I imagine this is just another one of those grand doomsdays schemes that makes for a perfect movie but isn't actually practical. Just like covering the artic/antartic with carbon black (to change the albedo(sp?)) it is something people could do, but not without arousing great sucpiscion. So it's great to have your super secret organization with sub-ice airports launch an operation to cover the pole with carbon black over the course of hours any reasonable terrorist plot would be detected before anything of substance was accomplished. Similarly, SPECTRE might be able to install thousands of tons of explosive from their underground tunnels but any real terrorists wouldn't be able to install enough explosives before being detected.
So it sounds like a great plot for a James Bond movie, and I hope I'm not wrong about how much explosives it would take.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
For your consideration, Kansai International Airport
This was all done just so a city could have a new airport. Considering the threat to all of the cities in the Atlantic of the Canary Islands, and the example of the Indian Ocean devastation, why do you continue to champion apathy over a can-do attitude?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'd point out that, by your logic, you should immediately kill yourself to better the planet. I would, but I've actually pronouced a few people who did that very thing.
Reminds me of my wife's story of the carpool.
Four or so in the car. Driver put forth the proposition that the population of the earth really needed to be reduced (for all the usual leftist and envirowacko reasons). Others in the car were concurring.
As they were doing something over the speed limit on the main span of the Dumbarton Bridge at the time, my wife, doing her best deadpan, said that this was a GREAT idea and he should start RIGHT NOW by IMMEDIATELY turning HARD RIGHT. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
http://www.drgeorgepc.com/TsunamiMegaEvaluation.ht ml
Anyone care to place a wager on the plot of the next crappy disaster flick?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Anyone wish to explain why the energy in a giant
tidal wave does not attenuate as it travels across
the ocean? It just seems that the wave would greatly
diminish in size as it propagates.
...what would happen if ALL the world's "supervolcanos" erupted at about the same time, which then shook the Earth so much that all islands that could collapse into the sea did so, causing tsunamis to strike every country on Earth, which will cause the world's media to go into a frenzy as they won't know which disaster to put on the headlines/front page, resulting in stampedes in all major cities by journalists, causing the road networks to block up, resulting in the car industries going bust, causing unemployment to rise (after the sharp fall, due to almost everyone dying from the previous disasters), resulting in an economic collapse as investors panic.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/
During the period from about 120,000 years ago to 20,000 years ago, the Antarctic Ice Sheet grew much larger than it is today. This was the last glacial phase. Since about 20,000 years ago, the ice sheet has been retreating to its present size. This marks the present interglacial phase of the cycle. A similar change occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, with ice sheets expanding across large areas of North America, Asia, and Europe. Shifts in climatic conditions occur across the globe accompany these cycles. This cycle of advance and retreat of the ice sheets in the Northern and Southern hemispheres has occurred many times in the past and will occur again in the future.
All but small remnants of the continental ice sheets retreated from North America thousands of years ago. Although it may appear that the Ice Age has ended, many scientists argue that our present relatively warm period represents but a brief interlude and that the glaciers may again advance in the future.
A glacier covering much North America, Europe, and Asia seems like a more serious (and more likely) problem than a mega tsunami.http://www.drgeorgepc.com/TsunamiMegaEvaluation.ht ml
I can't believe nobody has suggested this: If we can blow mountains up to make way for railroads/roads, then a slightly larger-scaled version of some mountain blowing-upping can push the side of the island into the water in small increments, causing no more than a smidgen of concern!
Unfortunately, that has high risk of precipitating exactly the event it is trying to mitigate.
For starters, it's already slipping even in the absense of eruptions. Secondly, removing some of the weight that's keeping the lid on the lava and gas will likely reawaken the volcano. (That's how mountains explode - as was discovered at Mt St Helens.)
And of course there's the question of who would PAY for this. And the little matter of what mining corporation in its right mind would take a contract, and its associated liability risks, where one screwup wipes out the whole atlntic seacoast of more than one continent.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Why doesn't the US administration just declare the Canary Islands a terrorist state and invade/nuke the place?
It has been his policy everywhere else in the world.
Perhaps no one hears about these 'mega-tsunamis' much from the media because most scientists agree it could never happen? From http://www.sthjournal.org/media.htm :
....Volcanoes on La Palma ... and Hawaii", George Pararas-Carayannis, in Science of Tsunami Hazards, Vol 20, No.5, pages 251-277, 2002.
Here are a set of facts, agreed on by committee members, about the claims in these reports:
- While the active volcano of Cumbre Vieja on Las Palma is expected to erupt again, it will not send a large part of the island into the ocean, though small landslides may occur. The Discovery program does not bring out in the interviews that such volcanic collapses are extremely rare events, separated in geologic time by thousands or even millions of years.
- No such event - a mega tsunami - has occurred in either the Atlantic or Pacific oceans in recorded history.
- The colossal collapses of Krakatau or Santorin (the two most similar known happenings) generated catastrophic waves in the immediate area but hazardous waves did not propagate to distant shores. Carefully performed numerical and experimental model experiments on such events and of the postulated Las Palma event verify that the relatively short waves from these small, though intense, occurrences do not travel as do tsunami waves from a major earthquake.
- The U.S. volcano observatory, situated on Kilauea, near the current eruption, states that there is no likelihood of that part of the island breaking off into the ocean.
- These considerations have been published in journals and discussed at conferences sponsored by the Tsunami Society.
Some papers on this subject include:
"Evaluation of the threat of Mega Tsunami Generation From
"Modeling the La Palma Landslide Tsunami", Charles L. Mader, in Science of Tsunami Hazards, Vol. 19, No. 3, pages 160-180, 2001.
"Volcano Growth and the Evolution of the Island of Hawaii", J.G. Moore and D.A.Clague, in the Geologic Society of America Bulletin, 104, 1992.
All these scary things being discussed, asteroids hitting the earth, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, terrorism, all this fear in general of something to become an extinction level event.
;)
I am *so* confident that the human race will not go extinct in the next 30 years, that I will bet 1 million dollars, double or nothing that the human race will not be extinct in 2035. Any takers?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
http://www.hypography.com/article.cfm?id=31610
If you look up 'sardonic' in the dictionary, Dyer's picture is likely there.
He's big on gloom and doom but has done interesting documentaries in the past.
So I mostly agree with your conclusions, I even made a similar post about it being more a bond film device than something for real terrorists. However, just the weight of the rock isn't enough to guarantee this. Apparently this slab is particularly precarious or else we wouldn't be worrying about it in the first place. After all we aren't worried about the actual Isle of Man being knocked over into the sea. In theory you can balance an arbitrarily large amount of stuff in a manner which allows a fingertip to topple it over.
So I am inclined to believe that nothing on that scale could be affected reasonable amounts of conventional explosives (reasonable includes multiple jetliners filled with explosives). However, I would really like actual confirmation that things weren't balanced that carefully.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
The result is that a disruption along a wave front can "heal" itself. This means that the undisrupted part of the wave front slowly fills in the disrupted part. The further past the dispruption you are, the less obvious it becomes that a dispruption even took place.
As a result, islands that are far from the coast may not give much protection.
Also note that bays and inlets can serve to focus and guide the wave energy. For example, a tsunami once reached Port Alberni on Vancouver Island. Here's a map http://www.travelamap.com/canada/centralisland.htm .
Read it and weep.
Thinking about 60 - 100 ft of water on New York City for 10 - 15 minutes. Washes entirely over Long Island. Manhattan has a lot of steel and concrete. Do the skyscrapers remain standing? Does the wave arrive as a wall, at full height, or is it a series of swells?
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Brazil is the fifth or sixth largest country in the world, with some 8.5 million square kilometers. There isn't any volcano in Brazil which has been active in the last 10 million years. There has never been any recorded earthquake over magnitude 3 Richter in Brazil. No winds above 120 km/h. Of course, one cannot predict the small random asteroid impacts, but Brazil seems to be somewhat safe from most large natural disasters.
I guess we can only save humanity one project at a time, maybe the world grid can help solve this problem. That is, If the world grid ever finishes the human Proteome
First satellites, now this. Someone should let this guy know that he's taking jobs away from paid government and private sector researchers and idea guys.
According to another article on the BBC news site http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3963563.stm the threat of the volcanoes in the Canary Islands causing a tsunami on the Eastern Seaboard is an unlikely event.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1206
Duh!
I live in Denver and was hoping to have some beachfront property sometime. Its depressing to have to drive so far to see the ocean.
I wonder if there isa physical limit to how much potential energy of a landslide could be converted into wave height? Meteor impact students suggest much of that energy would be immediately converted into heat because the bedrock can only transmit so much energy before vaporizing.
However, as we've seen from historical tsunamis, the known largest waves of a100 feet is sufficient to kill millions.
The richest states voted Democrat, but the richest people within those states---the ones who pay the bulk of the taxes you're referring to---voted Republican. On the whole, people who vote Republican typically end up subsidizing people who vote Democrat.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
lol
Once again, Apple is in a class of its own.
http://www.apple.com
Arthur C Clarke was there researching the possibility.
You make it sound like he was on some sort of research expedition to sri lanka. He lives there.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
your math seems to skip a few steps. please enlighten us. what's the density of "rock"? is it the same as water?
It's called Icefire. It's a techno-thriller. I picked it up not knowing what to expect, and ended up being pleasantly surprised.
/ qid=1104358254/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/701-9027329-3 461903
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671014021
90m wave strikes:
New York
Boston
Miami
Hartford
Residual wave strikes:
Washington DC
Baltimore
Philadelphia
Hm. From "flyover country" MN, aside from the enormous ocean pollution it would generate, I can't see much worth saving. If only we could arrange aftershocks to hit the west coast too.
-Styopa
And all along, I too thought Idaho was in the North West... Say, I think you can ignore the Ohio River Valley Fault. Watch out for the New Madrid fault though.
And what is to stop terrorist from blowing up this island cause they don't like the US?
would it be impossible for terrorists to detonate a nuke and cause it to slide???
http://www.rense.com/general61/tickingtimebomb.htm
Ticking Time Bomb
By John Atcheson
12-27-4
"We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden." -- Bill McKibben
The Arctic Council's recent report on the effects of global warming in the far north paints a grim picture: global floods, extinction of polar bears and other marine mammals, collapsed fisheries. But it ignored a ticking time bomb buried in the Arctic tundra.
There are enormous quantities of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses trapped in ice-like structures in the cold northern muds and at the bottom of the seas. These ices, called clathrates, contain 3,000 times as much methane as is in the atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.
Now here's the scary part. A temperature increase of merely a few degrees would cause these gases to volatilize and "burp" into the atmosphere, which would further raise temperatures, which would release yet more methane, heating the Earth and seas further, and so on. There's 400 gigatons of methane locked in the frozen arctic tundra - enough to start this chain reaction - and the kind of warming the Arctic Council predicts is sufficient to melt the clathrates and release these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Once triggered, this cycle could result in runaway global warming the likes of which even the most pessimistic doomsayers aren't talking about.
An apocalyptic fantasy concocted by hysterical environmentalists? Unfortunately, no. Strong geologic evidence suggests something similar has happened at least twice before.
The most recent of these catastrophes occurred about 55 million years ago in what geologists call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when methane burps caused rapid warming and massive die-offs, disrupting the climate for more than 100,000 years.
The granddaddy of these catastrophes occurred 251 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, when a series of methane burps came close to wiping out all life on Earth.
More than 94 percent of the marine species present in the fossil record disappeared suddenly as oxygen levels plummeted and life teetered on the verge of extinction. Over the ensuing 500,000 years, a few species struggled to gain a foothold in the hostile environment. It took 20 million to 30 million years for even rudimentary coral reefs to re-establish themselves and for forests to regrow. In some areas, it took more than 100 million years for ecosystems to reach their former healthy diversity.
Geologist Michael J. Benton lays out the scientific evidence for this epochal tragedy in a recent book, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time. As with the PETM, greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide from increased volcanic activity, warmed the earth and seas enough to release massive amounts of methane from these sensitive clathrates, setting off a runaway greenhouse effect.
The cause of all this havoc?
In both cases, a temperature increase of about 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit, about the upper range for the average global increase today's models predict can be expected from burning fossil fuels by 2100. But these models could be the tail wagging the dog since they don't add in the effect of burps from warming gas hydrates. Worse, as the Arctic Council found, the highest temperature increases from human greenhouse gas emissions will occur in the arctic regions - an area rich in these unstable clathrates.
If we trigger this runaway release of methane, there's no turning back. No do-overs. Once it starts, it's likely to play out all the way.
Humans appear to be capable of emitting carbon dioxide in quantities comparable to the volcanic activity that started these chain reactions. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, burning fossil fuels releases more than 150 times the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by volcanoes - the equivalent
I don't know about the rest of you, but this story just doesn't seem physically right to me... I don't see how a relatively local event like a volcanic landslide could cause the same kind of damage that continental plates can do. These two events are not on the same scale. Yes, the landslide is a displacement wave, but it's a geologically minor event compared to a continental plate shift.
Now we know who will win the whole East Coast / West Coast rap battle
Too late. Scimitar SL-2
You must think in Russian.
Here is how it works: The blue states have a Democratic majority, but the majority of their money is held by Republicans. The reason is that this wealthy minority is very wealthy. The rich people in New York City and Connecticut are largely Republican, but form a minority of the population. They essentially fund the rest of the population. These states can make ends meet because they are rich. If I were in charge of Connecticut, I could make ends meet too. Nobody can make ends meet in Alabama, Democrat or Republican, because it's poor.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
With potential disaster of this magnitude we should do whatever we can to prevent it. In this case it may be plausible to dismantle this menance before it blows. If it is plausible then we should do so asap. It isn't often we get to save 100 million lives with one bit of engineering.
If you are interested in seeing what a mega-tsunami might do to your favourite coastline, have a look at this: http://www.uow.edu.au/science/eesc/research/Variou s%20research/tsun.htm
You will find photos (linked at the bottom) of some of the more dramatic and long term effects, such as cavitation erosion of bedrock, boulder deposition and rockshelf breakage (and deposition).
Note: the information is Australian centric but does discuss other tsunamis from history.
First, shallow water surface waves travel at a speed directly tied to the wave length and water depth. Tsunami waves are 10 to 100 miles long, and are thus shallow water wave everwhere on Earth.
;->)
But there is a speed limit, and thus a limit on the energy transmitted. Wave action is normally a very efficient way to transmit energy. But once the surface wave goes above 0.7-0.8 Mach of the air above, the energy is spent misting and roiling the water. Thus a huge surface event will only be locally more destructive, and perhaps will not couple nearly as much energy into a wave.
The most effective way to couple massive energy into the ocean is as a pressure wave. To avoid wasting energy by forming voids and boiling water, it's best done in very deep water where the pressure is high and the energy spreads widely before becoming a surface wave. Now think back to the news reports -- this recent quake happened at over 10 kilometers sea depth. It likely coupled as much impulse energy as the ocean would handle at that (relatively deep) depth.
Another consideration is the wave reflective effect of the Atlantic ridge. With a gradual bottom slope most of the energy is converted to a slower, steeper wave. With a ridge much of the energy is reflected, resulting in a more gradual surge.
There are a bunch of other factors, but basically "it can't happen here" isn't as far off as you might think. (Statement applys to U.S. East coast residents only -- no one else matters
What I don't get is why I haven't seen anyone propose draining the water out of the volcano. Surely it would be possible to do horizontal drilling into the critical pockets of water and let the water drain out until the water pressure is lowered sufficiently that the risk is reduced.
I imagine you would be dealing with a fair amount of water but not something unimaginable. Say 10% of the rain that falls on the volcano accumulates in the critical pockets. You might want to drain off 500 years of accumulation in the next 10 years. That would be the equivalent of 5 times the rainfall on the volcano, or approximately the drainage rate of several typical mountain rivers -- big engineering but certainly doable.
Are there any interpretations of Nostradamus' auguries about tsunamis? One site told that he never mentioned Indian Ocean.
What does this mean to us in mountanour or hilly areas in NJ. For example, my home town is supposedly 220 ft above sea level. My area is on a hill maybe 30-40 ft above the center of town (we're on the outskirts). So, would a 150ft wave even matter to us?
nobody should have voted for Bush.. now God is going to smite us all with a MEGA Tsunami
Microsoft Windows runs on stress and frustration.
An image of chicken little crying about how the sky is fallilng to get eyes on their osdn ads.
Seriously, articles about how there might be an astroid with our number or that a piece of the Canary Islands might fall into the ocean creating a tsunami mere days after the disaster in southeast Asia is not journalism. Since I'm not new here, I know that Slashdot is about journalism.
It's about end-of-the-world histrionics with the much-abused torino scale, how Microsoft will 0wn us all without the savior of teh Lunix, articles which are really product placement and sometimes a rare submission which really is "stuff that matters".
Next on Slashdot: reports a company is selling blueprints to build a dirty bomb! Cheap!
An image of chicken little crying about how the sky is fallilng to get eyes on their osdn ads.
Seriously, articles about how there might be an astroid with our number or that a piece of the Canary Islands might fall into the ocean creating a tsunami mere days after the disaster in southeast Asia is not journalism. Since I'm not new here, I know that Slashdot is about journalism.
It's about end-of-the-world histrionics with the much-abused torino scale, how Microsoft will 0wn us all without the savior of teh Lunix, articles which are really product placement and sometimes a rare submission which really is "stuff that matters".
Next on Slashdot: Roland Piquepaille reports a company is selling blueprints to build a dirty bomb! Cheap!
for being disgustingly in bad taste, and totally self centered. The death toll is probably in the 50,000 mark in the pacific, but someone has to come out and say "yeah but if like a meteorite hit the atlantic or summit there would be much more and stuff, and american lives too and stuff".
Disasters with massive loss of life are not to be used as one upmanship, and the current tragedy should not be a tool to start another round of "apocolypse when".
May darwin smile on the western shoreline!
I have been banging this drum for a while, but now it may get the braintime it needs...
Billions of dollars are being spent in the name of name of "making the USA safe"..
Given that all the terrorists in the world hijacking all the airliners in the world could not do a fraction of the damage that a serious explosive in the right place on Gran Canaria could do, do you feel that your money is being well spent?
Too late though.
Huh? looks like whoever was doing the simulation was too early
i'm pretty sure ACC lives in Sri Lanka anyway, on account of it being a very nice place to live (acts of god excepted), but fair enough, he was not unaware f this possibility..
I'm like you, glad I live in Missouri (Springfield), but I guess we have to consider the New Madrid fault, which was "suppose" to pop a few years ago. My thoughts on natural disasters is that you do what you can, within reason, to prepare for them. But, something like what happened in the pacific I doubt really can be prevented, unless you force everyone to move away from the coasts, or build a 100 foot wall around the beach
This story is a recycling of a story that's already been widely discredited - the original reserach was entirely funded by an insurance company. If the lazy idiot who posted this story had actually followed up on the BBC report that he's linked to, he'd have seen that the BBC themselves posted a later article where the original analysis was refuted - see below. Why on earth do the /. moderators let this sort of crap get posted?
t u re/material/megatsunami.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3963563.stm
http://personal.telefonica.terra.es/web/iberiana
A popular misconception.
:)
Red staters aren't evil...just stupid.
Another popular misconception. (For starters, most of the actual rocket scientists are red staters.) In fact the IQ mix is similar. At one time the nutritional and educational influences gave the red staters a disadvantage, but for the last fifty years or so the disadvantage has gone the other way.
What makes them different is their value systems.
But blue staters (meaning the actual ones that voted to make them come out blue), like most collectivists, enforce social conformity by a number of mechanisms. One of the biggest is trashing the self-esteem of anyone who says or does something to indicate their value systems diverges, even slightly, from the norm. They recieve a broad range of invective, and one of the commest slurs is "stupid".
Within the group this drives them to change their attitudes to conform. But people outside the group, with their own social support networks, aren't swayed (or are quickly swayed back when their friends see their angst and offer moral support). So the continual slurs from the thought-police evolve into a stereotyping of the members of the outsider groups. This is followed by ethnic discrimination which, coming from people who constantly harp about "tolerance" and "diversity", is a source of much humor.
It's particularly funny when real-world evidence surfaces. For instance: There's a continual din in the blue states about how G. W. Bush is "stupid". As a result of the flap over their Vietnam-era military services, Bush's military records, and some of Kerry's, were opened. The military tests IQ, and both candidates' test results got out. Bush far outdid Kerry. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Massonetal01_ESR.pdf
in general, once the waves hit the open ocean, it IS a straight line path. Islands will tend to absorb waves, "creating shadow patterns". There is an excellent analysis here:
GRL- Cumbre Vieja Volcano -- Potential collapse and tsunami at La Palma, Canary Islands (PDF)
complete with illustrations that demonstrate that the Bahamas protect Miami, if not much else.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
may be /. should put a D-Day countdown ticker on its homepage...
my example of kansai was simply to open your eyes about the possibility of taking on large, daunting tasks
it was not an open door for you to compare and contrast the details of the prospective effort
in fact, if you really want to start analyzing the task at hand, then i have further news for you:
kansai was about construction, canaries would be about demolition
as in some tnt properly placed here, some tnt properly placed there
therefore, it's an even easier task than you seem to be able to imagine
gravity and explosives are all you need to turn what would be a one-event demolition by earthquake/ volcano in the future, causing much suffering, into a multi-event of smaller incremental well-placed demolitions, causing no suffering
the more you think about it, in fact, the more possible it sounds, and the cheaper it sounds
so again, why the negatvity?
geez, some people!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Just a thought - how long will it take for the spammers and scammers to take advantage of this disaster?
It's not news at all that scientists predict an eventual "mega-tsunami" that will sweep across the Atlantic that will still be anything from 60 to 150 ft high when it hits the U.S. Eastern seaboard.
If it happens in the next four years, you can bet that liberals and Europeans will be blaming it all on Bush while thounsands of Arabs dance in the street.
I don't think that even the liberals and Europeans would blame Bush for a natural disaster. Unless they could tie it into "global warming" perhaps.
I was there during August for a week... one of the most beautiful places on earth...
even took a trip up the volcano on a bus tour... the spanish have little regard for road safety... that was a giant bus on a very narrow twisty road, with a tiny guardrail... and a drop unlike anything I've ever seen before. The asphalt in some places goes right off a cliff... and the little green dots on the bottom are clusters of big palm trees.... needless to say it's a bit strange coming from the US where any road with more than a 3 ft drop off the side has a giant concrete barrier.
Ironic to think that beautiful island could doom my east coast life in the NYC area.
Great view from up top... amazing sand dunes, beach, and beautiful blue water. Before that the only place I've seen such landscape is in pictures. Hawaii is nice... but the view isn't as good.
If terrorists ever get ahold of an nuclear bomb. It would be easier for them to detonate it there (since they're based not far from the region) rather than smuggle it into the USA. And the damage could obviously be much worse if they triggered the collapse! So it is a great security issue to get not only seismometers there but security staff as well.
This recent submarine earthquake occured when a ridge of the floor of Indian ocean a few HUNDRED miles long dropped 90 - 300 feet. A collapsing island even a large one could never generate that much power.
A long shot for sure, but given the consequences, a few simple steps could help. Short Term - Some university or government agency should scatter a handful of solar-powered GPS receivers over the slope, trasmitting short-range to an satellite uplink on a stable part of the island. If they move, the agengy would sound the alarm to other agencies, and have satellite, seismic, etc. corroboration. For the warning systen, FEMA calls CNN. Within minutes, every tv, radio and internet outlet will pick up the story. Relatives call home phones and cellphones. SMS messages are sent. The word gets around. People tune to CNN, where they are told to move away from low-lying areas, seek refuge in the east end of basements, occupy sturdy buildings, bicycle to a hilltop; whatever. Medium Term - Study the problem. Fund the science. Is it real? Get more funding. Refine the plan. Long Term - I used to be a geotechnical engineer. There is a little used, expensive technology called "in situ vitrification". Put four electrodes in the ground, run a honking big current through it, and melt the ground. The resulting glass traps the contaminants. So, build a nuclear power plant in on the island, and spot-weld the slip plane. Honestly people, what's the big fuss?
If you are afraid of natural disasters, move to a country like Brazil where there is none.
This is one of the reasons why I love my country.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~mke/tsunami.htm Good description of what would happen once this volcano on the Canaries erupts. Lots of other cool end of the world scenarios on the parent site, http://www.xs4all.nl/~mke/exitmundi.htm
I would be willing to go to the Canary Islands and jump up and down on the beach.
Given the promise of eliminating Washington, New York and the rest of the East Coast in one drop, no effort should be spared.
Just build a thick enough break water around the thing. Alternatively, use dynamite to send it into the sea one small chunk at a time, so that by the time the island blows its top, there is nothing to go sliding into the ocean.
Grandmaster of the Revolutionary Order of the Forty-Two Fish
Trust me, the Arabs won't be the only ones dancing in the street.
Would it be possible to send out a general alert to all cell phones w/in areas that are going to be affected by a disaster such as a tidal wave?
Don't buy beach-front property in the eastern half of the country.
Finally, my chance to show those "big wave" surfers what it's really all about...
We're all DOOOOOMED!
...when we're talking about predicted wave heights on the Western Saharan shore of Brazil??? I'm no geography whiz, but I'm pretty sure the Sahara is located on a different continent.
Just in case, I'll be sure to keep clear of that portion of Brazil, should I ever get a chance to go there.
The day will come when we'll be able to control nature and not have to worry about earthquakes, hurricanes and asteroids.
We'll be more worried about wether any neighboring galaxies are going to run into our milky way.
This is the more recent BBC article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3963563.stm
Granted 100,000 dead or more is a very bad thing, but I have read several articles this year speculating that if the bird flu mutated and spread amongst humans this year, we may be seeing 1 million plus dead worldwide etc on the low end (extreme estimates were 100 million to 1 billion). So quick build the ocean warning systems that may not see a tsunami in their operational lifetime. Don't invest money into better methods of developing vaccines that aren't as painfully slow as culturing the vaccine in eggs. We currently don't have video of people dying en masse of flu on TV so thats not a priority.
Why bother moving so many tons of rock? Why not just build a giant geothermal plant there that generates electricity, with the nice side-effect of cooling down the volcano and perhaps postponing the next eruption. There is no change in sea level because the rock stays where it is (except for the holes drilled for the pipes).
What to do with the excess electricity? It could be used to generate hydrogen.
Still a major undertaking, but cheap if it saves only one city. And it might just pay for itself.
People might draw their conclusions right there and then. All geologists in the world will be bouncing up and down about it and since it's the geologists that are to alert the authorities in the first place, it may actually be quicker to just start evacuating on the sight of La Palma sliding off into the ocean then to wait for the first tsunami warning - buoy to go off.
The second article does indeed state that "harbours and estuaries that funnel the waves inland" will be "worst hit". I would think that this would apply to Puget Sound, which is open to the ocean at one end (although it is somewhat protected by a sharp bend and numerous islands, it would seem to me to be at least as vulnerable as some of the cities mentioned, e.g. Philedelphia).
It is worth noting, however, that Puget Sound is in Washington State (on the West coast of the US) and opens onto the Pacific Ocean, so it would not be at a direct risk from this particular potential tsunami. I would imagine, however, that similar threats exist in the Pacific Ocean (the BBC article says that such potentially devastating volcanoes are "scattered across the world's oceans").
The bottom line is that you are not safe anywhere.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
It looks like the insurance industry has thought about it.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Not necessarily -- many could be evacuated by boat to Conneticut, which would be relatively protected by Long Island Sound.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Margaret Atwood has an excellent record so far as a prophet. Ever read The Handmaid's Tale? (shudders)
In addition to the tragic loss of life, the loss of any large area of this planet results in the loss of an ecological or economic center. If one area grows 90% of the oranges, or 75% of the rice, or in fact is the primary supplier of *anything*, we will feel the impact sooner rather than later.
Diversity aids survival. Specialization and concentration of power is a recipe for disaster.
Don't worry too much, the math does not add up. For one thing half a trillion is a very round number, and this logic of how this will play out has more curves than Brianna Banks. Even given this number as a 'rough' estimate, that means that about 34 cubic miles of rock will fall into the sea. Now that is a lot from just one mountain. And the whole mountain is not falling, just one side of it. Now I watched the BBC program about La Palma. and this mountain is a skinny sucker with most of the trees logged off it long ago. There is not enough volume in the whole mountain to equal even half of 34 cubic miles. Then there is the other half of the energy equation, volume out. This megawage purports to move about 600 cubic miles of water a vertical elevation of over 100 feet!? That is many times the weight of the moving force. I read somewhere in the dim past of my engineering education that forces lose local vector intensity as a declining cubic function of the distance from the center. Let the reader take his judgement from there.
Not sure if this has been posted, but I found it to be a really neat illustration of what got hit and why.
i a/ 041229-2-m1.html
http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041229/multimed
this sig has been rated E for Everyone.
fixed link:
/ 041229-2-m1.html
http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041229/multimedia
this sig has been rated E for Everyone.
all be it on a far smaller scale, we've just seen a large tsunami cross thousands of miles of ocean from the east side of the indian ocean to its west side and drown half of Sri Lanka and western India. It's no use sticking your fingers in your ears shouting "la la la not listening". Most of the Indian ocean is not 10 miles deep, it's mostly 4-6 miles deep which is about the same as the Atlantic.
I take your point about the positioning of the source of the wave - the Indian Ocean tsunami occured at ocean trench depth. Whereas the Canary Island Tsunami will occur due to a displacement above sea level. However the 500 cubic kilometres of rock being dumped straight off the continental shelf (because the Canary Islands are right at the edge) would effectively be like dropping a very big penny in a very big pond.
The mid-Atlantic Ridge at its highest point is still 4 miles below the surface of the ocean. It will dissipate some of the energy - which is why the original 1800 foot waves may only be about 100 foot when they hit the eastern sea board. Mind you as it continues on its way passed the mid-Atlantic ridge and rolls down the other side it will have an opportunity to amplify down to greater depths so who knows?
they never are. We know a collapse will happen but even when it's the big one we won't know it's going to happen til it starts to happen by which point it is too late.
Crying wolf with something like this is not a good idea.
I'm actually surprised that some of you techno-science-type guys didn't think of this already, but you all can thank me later. It's really quite simple, see. All we need is a gigantic pair of those Bose noise-cancelling headphones pointed at the island to cancel out the tsunami wave, no fuss, no muss!! Now, how hard was that to figure out!?! (I swear, it's like you guys don't think or something...)
I can imagine the text message.
"OMG TDL WV! 4PM! RUN!"
Would the force from the eruption of Yellowstone be enough to cause what's being called the "worst-case scenario" in the Atlantic?
The BBC Horizon program which started the La Palma Tsunami story is based on bad research and bad maths and funded by the Insurance Industry.
It has been comletely invalidated by ALL the leading scientific authorities. There is not a single piece of independent research to support this wild theory.
The motivation for the film is to get Americans to buy insurance and get funding so that the researchers don't get dumped on the street when their grants run out.
I can understand that they would want to do research on the beautiful island of La Palma, but they are telling and repeating so many lies that it is unbelievable.
The leading scientists have destroyed the theory.
Read a summary of their work at http://www.lapalma-tsunami.com/