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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.
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
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.
"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
I don't think that is true. There are 2 systems in the Pacific but because Tsunamis are very rare in the Atlantic there is no early warning system.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
At least in the Atlantic, we have an early warning system for Tsunamis
Untrue. The Pacific has the only dedicated system (although Tsunamis may be inferred from other equipment like tidal gauges.)
I assume this has been contemplated, but couldn't we cause the threatening hunk of rock to slide in a safer direction? Like cutting down a tottering tree?
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
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.
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.
... there go the blue states :(
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
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.
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?
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...
Doomed! The megatsunami will hit us in a thousand years and we are doomed. DOOMED!!
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.
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
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
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)
Ocean front property in North carolina. From my front porch you can see the sea...oh hell... is that what I think it is?
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
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.
Let's build a huge dike around where the mountain is going to slide and drain it. We can call up the Netherlands, they know how to do this kind of stuff.
Combine that with some baffles, and we can break off a piece at a time and drop it, with limited risk if the whole thing breaks lose.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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!
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.
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
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.
It is thought that the tsunami will be caused by a volcanic eruption. We usually get a lot of warning of those, so people could be put on high alert during an eruption. There would probably be additional warning before the landslide starts.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
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.
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
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.
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...
If we can create enormous holes in the ground via strip mining I'm sure it's not beyond us technologically. You'd want to start at the top and break away rock and somehow let it slide into the ocean in a controlled and gradual way. I can't find a picture of the volcano that would suggest how hard this would be, though.
If this were considered a serious enough problem, the money and political will would be found.
As for early warning, a lot of people live on this island and I'm positive they have some kind of seismic equipment that would give advance notice of an eruption. We would definitely hear about it in advance - maybe days or weeks.
Would the US government have the political will or foresight to organize an evacuation of the Eastern Seaboard and the Carribean Islands, and would this even be remotely possible? Probably no on all counts.
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
A well to do doctor of my acquaintance had a boat-house up on Lake Seed in North Georgia. Runoff from Lakes Burton's hydroelectric dam feeds Lake Seed which feeds runoff from its hydroelectric dam into Lake Raburn.
Recently the aftermath from one of this year's Hurricanes hit North Georgia hard with thunderstorms and high winds. Lake Burton has historic houses and many homes of power company executives so overflow was dumped into Lake Seed to keep the water level of Lake Burton from rising. Lake Seed rose and washed away this doctor's boat house and motorboats.
Supposedly, the insurance company will not pay for the boat-house or powerboat since the accident was man made rather than natural and therefore not covered by the policy. The insurance representative suggested filing a civil suit against the power company instead.
Take this with a grain of salt of course, though insurance salespeople are very devious with misrepresenting what their policies will actually cover, my doctor friend is notoriously cheap and may have chosen insufficient coverage. Whether this tale is the truth or not is incidental; it has inspired me to review my insurance coverage which is always a good thing to do every once in a while.
Most costal properties already have flood insurance. Good luck finding your insurance agent after this disater, tho.
This could be the next Lex Luthor plot. Instead of triggering the San Andreas to get beachfront property in Nevada, he could trigger the landslide and buy cheap, devastated land on the US east coast.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
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.
Very low.
You need to push 500,000,000 tons of rock (thats real tons not US tons too). Not only would you need to sneak an awful lot of explosive onto the island you'd have to drill some huge huge holes in the right place in an active volcano (ie rather warm rock below the surface in places) and put all your bombs down it without anyone noticing. As an idea of scale you are talking about disloging an object not dissimilar in size to the Isle of Man. Swatting it with a missle or crashing a plane into it isn't going to have much effect.
It is a model that governments have looked at (that much I know from some stuff where I was involved in helping look at more mundane questions like computer super-viruses "chernobyl meets slammer" etc).
It looks more like a great Bond film than a realistic hazard although it is without a doubt a terrorists dream. Prime time tv coverage for several hours of the wave racing towards New York, unavoidable carnage, powerless governments and all the rest.
From the BBC:
Modelling by colleagues in Switzerland shows that such a landslide could trigger a so-called mega-tsunami, which has an initial wave height of 650 metres (2,130 feet) and moves out over the ocean at speeds up to 720 km/h (450 mph).
By the time such a wave crossed the Atlantic, its power would have diminished but it could still wreak havoc up to 20 kilometres (12 miles) inland.
And from the Questions and Answers section:
Scientists also know that a collapse will not happen without any warning. They will be able to alert people to possible danger several weeks in advance.
So we've got a few weeks to move (several hundred million) people 20 kilometers. Still a huge operation but it should be possible.
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?
What I remember most from my visits to FL was how incredibly flat it is. I grew up in Santa Cruz, CA and now live in Portland, OR and am used to variation in terrain. Looking out of the hotel window you could see nothing but flatness on the horizen in all directions. To put in perspective, the 351' highest point you quote is shorter than over 30 buildings in Miami alone!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
It's a significant land mass, it's not a tree.
True, but the solution may be the same: take it down a little at time. Remember, the problem isn't that millions of tons (or whatever) of rock are going to end up in the sea. It's that they're going to end up there at the same time. If you distribute that same amount over several 'trips' into the ocean, it amounts to a lot of little waves.
Even if you can't eliminate the threat, might it not be possible to reduce it? Think of the danger to your house posed by a 12 foot tree versus a 24 foot tree.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
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
it would take more then a 'small nuke' to do that anyways... This past quake at 9.0 was equal to 100 million nukes...
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 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.
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
The geologists believe there would be a couple of weeks warning that it was likely to happen, not a couple of hours that it had. You'd have time to cancel deliveries, buy a tent on ebay and move a few miles to higher ground.
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
We don't use "km" here, so that tsunami is just gonna have to go somewhere else with its commie agenda.
[We're] talking trillions of tons of rock off an active volcano, which might even distrub it enough to set it off anyway.
The mechanism of exploding mountains, as discovered when Mt St Helens went "bang" is:
- Pressure builds up, bulging the mountain upward.
- Suddenly the bulging causes the side of the mountain to slide off.
- With the weight suddenly removed, the pressure blasts the remaining portion of the mountain into dust and up into the stratosphere.
So IMHO attempting to remove the loose slab, slowly and gently, from the intermittently-active volcano (which is thus inactive now because the weight above it is enough to keep the lava and gas bottled up) very likely WOULD wake it up. If that happens, the part that isn't moved yet might just go right away.
And given that the slab is already slipping off slowly, disturbing it by trying to disassemble it risks finishing the job of loosening it and precipitating the event you're trying to avoid.
Kinda like defusing a BIG bomb. Or taking apart a large pile of jackstraws without having any of them collapse.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I will probably re-encode these to MPEG1 and re-upload.
clicky
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.
Nope its the "Isle of Man"
o s/ im.html
At least the one I am talking about, that is part of the United Kingdom.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ge
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.
If you look at where the recent tsunami hit, parts of Thailand which have been badly affected were "sheltered" behind Sumatra.
Looks like tsunami waves can diffract like any other kind of wave....
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?
> 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
The 26 Dec Asian Tsunami is reported to have gone 6 km (~3.7 miles) inland in some places and was "only" about 10m (31ft) high, so I draw a different conclusion if the waves predicted here for the U.S. east coast are "20-50m" high.
I would also imagine the height/strength of the structures "softening" the impact plays a role - at 50m height there are much less obstacles which pose any challenge than at 10m.
I'd be pretty scared.
Unfortunately, waves do not travel in straight lines (well, not in the way described). Waves act as if they are recreated at each point in the wavefront, which allows them to turn around corners.
This is highly dependant on wavelength to aperature ratio, which is why you can hear sounds around a corner, but not see around one.
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There is no direct warning system in place, but the fact is that Africa will be hit first - giving Spain an hour or two notice, and giving the US about ten hours notice to evacuate.
Of course, does anyone think New York could be evacuated in 10 hours?
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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
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.
Another thing to be cautious of with insurance - will the insurance company be able to cover what they have insured? Often, after a major incident like a hurricane, local insurance agencies refuse to pay out and instead go bankrupt...
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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.
We'll give them some casinos, and they'll be perfectly happy, and all will be fair and just!
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.
I have read there would be about 10 hours notice for the US.
And it will go 20 Kilometers inland.
couldn't that be handled on foot fairly reasonably?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The last Mt St. Helens eruption was just a teaser. Look to Mt. St. helens going bang like the volcano that Crater Lake used to be, before it exploded and threw debris as far as Montana, removing a mohn tain at least as large as Mt. St. Helens used to be, and a hole in the ground which is now the deepest lake in the US. Remember that Mt. St. Helens is just one in a chan of volcanos, and that they are all active and just waiting to go bang one day. Back to the East coast and a monster Tsunami - remember it would run over the huge Methane Hydrate deposits off the East coast, possibly causing a catestrophic release of the Methane and its associated hundreds of billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere - running a few miles inland is not going to save anyone from the effects of that. Nowhere in the US is really safe - why do you think the Brits let you have it so easily :-)
Too late though.
Huh? looks like whoever was doing the simulation was too early
>I don't think that is true. There are 2 systems >in the Pacific but because Tsunamis are very >rare in the Atlantic there is no early warning >system.
You seem to have missed the most cogent lesson of this disaster - there is no early warning system in the pacific either.
This had nothing to do with weather systems, this was a seafloor seismic event. However, it would seem that not having an early warning system is not an accurate indicator of low seismic activity. After all, prior to 2001, the chances of an aeroplane flying into a skyscraper were pretty low, no?
The fault on Gran Canaria is well-documented over a long period.. calculations have been carried out that show exactly what would happen if the entire fault gave way, and believe me, the eastern USA would consider Florida's recent hurricane to be fairly trivial in comparison..
Putting your head in the sand will not help much when the sand is under 10ft of water.....
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
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"
This is the more recent BBC article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3963563.stm