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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."
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
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'
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.
It seems to me, as with the asteroid collision possibility, that the better (only?) approach is prevention. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to investigate the possibility of gradually, and very, very carefully, relieving the stress on this cracked volcano, so that a 90-second catastrophic slide is replaced with a sustained slow erosion of the material.
There would still be a difficult political situation. It is entirely possible that the stress relief effort would carry its own risks of _causing_ the catastrophe it was designed to prevent. Similar tradeoffs occur in almost any risk mitigation strategy, although seldom with the stakes being this high.
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.
couldn't we cause the threatening hunk of rock to slide in a safer direction? Like cutting down a tottering tree?
Not without destroying most of the Island, plus where talking about a lot of rock here, This is more than just removing the top of some mountain ( which is hard enough ), I think you'd have to go down quite a way to the sea floor. Where talking trillions of tons of rock off an active volcano, which might even distrub it enough to set it off anyway.
How you would do it, who would pay for it, and would the locals let you? are also some of the other considerations.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
An expert on NPR yesterday referred to the fact that escaping a hurricane and escaping a tsunami are quite different. To get out of the path of a hurricane, you often need to travel hundreds of miles. To get out of the destructive range of a tsunami, just going a few miles can get you far enough inland to avoid the damage...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
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!
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.
Not that it matters, the asteroid is going to destroy the entire earth first. Or the mega volcano , or maybe the giant Staypuft Marshmallow Man.
Don't get me wrong, I'm appreciative of things like the Tsunami early warning system, what with my entire financial future being wrapped up in one of those expensive, east coast seaside homes (so seaside it has a private dock in one of the most desirable harbors in the east). So expensive I can't afford to live in the thing myself. Without godzillionaires who like to rent a "summer cottage" in such exclusive neighborhoods I couldn't afford to even pay the taxes on the thing.
Which means I'm at no particular personal risk of loss of life due to a Tsunami, since I actually live a couple hundred miles inland behind a mountain range, but possesion of that property means dying relatively well off, and the loss of it will mean dying in a state home.
Of course, I'll still be dead at the time, and something's going to get me sooner or later, whether it be a mega-this or mega-that, or just having a "mega" slip in the shower.
I'm just getting a little tired of all the "mega" disasters lurking under the bed with the boogeyman just waiting to grab our ankles and drag us under.
The universe is a nasty, violent place and it's a wonder that you even lived long enough to be potty trained. We're all going to die! Many of us violently. We are fragile little globs of water in a membrane, and it doesn't take much on the scale of forces in the universe to make us go "Pop!"
That's a damned good reason to take all reasonable precautions, but it's also a damned good reason to simply get used to the idea and take all reasonable opportunities to not worry about it overmuch.
KFG
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.
You know, it's not like the US has lost a whole lot of sleep over whether "the locals" would let you do something.
Niether endorsing nor condemning it, just crossed my mind.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
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.