Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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!
"on a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
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.
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
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.
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.
You bring up a fair point... but I think the point of this isn't to instill worry or panic (even though it might), it's to educate people so that if or when they are ever confronted with the imminent approach of this sort of disaster, they might have the sense to get the hell out of there, reducing loss of life.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
We know where the damned thing is, and can thus take counter measures.
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.
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.
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
I hope you don't work in one of those non-earthquake-proof buildings in St. Louis just a couple hundred miles from the New Madrid Fault.
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.
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.
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!
Don't think for a second the Olympic Peninsula will protect you from a 150ft Tsunami. Might slow it down, but not stop it.
As well, don't forget that Baker is a dormant Volcano too. And not to mention there's an earthquake expected sometime on the West Coast too.
Remember the one we had a few years ago??? (I'm from Vancouver, BC - we felt it too...)
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
It would be impossible to evacate the major cities on the east coast in 10 hours. NYC is probably the worst case scenerio for this: with the exception of The Bronx, the city's boroughs are connected to the mainland by a handful of bridges and tunnels[1].
With the wave heights involved with the Atlantic Collapse scenario, any building lower than six or seven stories is going to be completely underwater for at least 15 to 20 minutes. Even if you assumed that, say, all taller buildings would survive, for NYC alone, out of a population of 8 million, you're only talking about a carrying capacity in the low hundreds of thousands, or high tens of thousands. Many, if not most, of these survivors would then die of starvation or disease.
Then there's the fact that most of the east coast is flat: it's quite some driving before most people would get near a mountain, especially when the rising water is likely to be funnelled up densely populated corridors like the Hudson Valley.
Realistically, to evacuate the East Coast to safe ground, you'd need something on the order of, at least, 10 days, not hours. Even then, I'm not sure it could be done: a single city perhaps, not the entire coast.
[1] A nuclear power plant on Long Island close to NYC was closed in the 1980's when it was concluded that in the event of an accident, rapid safe evacuation of the city was impossible.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
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...
Of course it will rise. Do the math: 500e9 tons of rock ~= 100e9 m^3; ocean area ~= 3.6e14 m^2 -> water level rises about 0.27 millimeters. A measurable amount, but well less than 1/1000 of what they're speculating that melting glaciers might cause.
Jersey is horrible. Even without a tsunami
It wouldn't need to be completely evacuated. Most of the populated areas on the eastern seaboard is relatively "high"
Tell that to the people who live in Manhattan, Long Island, Boston, and other major cities along the eastern seaboard. I live outside Boston, and a 100 foot tsunami would probably devestate a huge chunk of the city. Cape Cod would likely be obliterated, and a mass evactuation of that area would easily take a full day, if not more. The traffic jams just on summer weekends getting of the Cape can easily run 4-6 hours on a bad day. Long Island and Manhattan would be in similar situations - huge population centers only a few feet above sea level, with a limited amount of escape routes.
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
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
Don't even need a nuke. It's even possible a nuke would be counterproductive, and stick the mass there even harder.
Look back about a month or so ago. In Western Utah they were doing some sort of desalination thing, and pumping the brine deep underground. There were also minor tremors nearby in Colorado. Turned out that the brine was lubricating a fault, and the tremors were little slips.
They stopped pumping the brine in Utah.
Which in a way is really dumb, because the pressure down there is building. Letting it out in lots of small slips is better than having it go off in a big one. But I guess in the US we're so into the blame game that we'd rather have a catastrophic accident that we can't get blamed for than minor incidents that we can.
So you don't need, maybe don't even want, a nuke.
Just a pumping station for ocean water.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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
Not to disagree with the first two facts agreed upon by the committee, but they say nothing of value.
1) Says that it will not collapse when an expected eruption occurs, but only uses as evidence in the statement that these collapses are rare. Rare occurences do happen, and although the timeframe for the occurances are large the probability of the event is random within that timeframe - however they may know more about the detailed geology of the island - but they do not point to that to back their assertion in the FAQ.
2) That no event has occured in recorded history isn't very convincing either as point 1 just said that the timeframe of these events is very large. Again having a long timeframe doesn't preclude the event from happening in the near future - just makes the odds lower.
The third point is a bit more useful as it relys on actual theory and simulations - however as the events are rare its unclear how much testing of the models is possible.
The fourth is just an assertion in the FAQ - to give benefit of the doubt that its based on geologic observations at the volcano and rely on the experts to review the assertion - but it doesn't do much in itself to assuage any doubts someone coming to the page might have.
So basically their FAQ gives the information that:
The threat at any point in time is low (large timeframe). (This does not preclude the threat from occuring, just reduces the odds and changes the cost/risk analysis)
The models they are using show localized not ocean crossing tsunamis - but as the timeframes between events are large the models haven't been compared to many if any actual events (though experimental tests in controlled conditions I hope have been done) -- This is the most useful information but they relegate it to a middle position in the list.
They do have some journal articles listed, and since they are online they are even useful however it would have been even more useful to actually link them from the FAQ.
-------- This space intentionally left blank --------
I don't think people understand the amount of force unleashed by geological events. The Indonesian tsunami was set off by an earthquake registering a 9 on the Richter scale. That translates to roughly 1,000 Megatons. That would be the equivalent of over 77,000 Hiroshima-style
bombs exploding at once (http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/quakes/magnitude.html).
The largest nuclear device ever detonated was the Tsar bomba. It was "only" 57 megatons (albeit capable of 100, but the Russians couldn't figure out how to run away in time). At any rate, it would still take 10 of those behemoths to generate this sort of destructive force.
Much like the Yellowstone super-volcano, this is just on of those things we can't do anything about. We're at the mercy of mother earth. As we have always been.