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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."
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.
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.
Florida will protect my home in Texas...
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'
Suddenly I don't feel so bad about living in Missouri.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
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.
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...
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
Now I can change my
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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"
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.
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.
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?
6 hours+. Plenty of time to evacuate a lot of people.
A lot, yes. Most, no. Consider New York City. Eight million residents, and millions more day workers. Roads which come to a stop and trains which totally fill just getting the day workers out each evening. People will try to retreat to high buildings and hope the foundations hold (probable, most are attached to bedrock) - but in the outer boroughs homes are mostly just a few stories. Will these folks be welcomed in the skyscrapers even if they get there? Plus, all of Long Island will be trying to evacuate over the same bridges used by the city.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
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
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
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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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.
We'll give them some casinos, and they'll be perfectly happy, and all will be fair and just!
According to this site, a magitude 10 would release some 1 trillion tons equivalent of energy, and would be the equivalent of a "San-Andreas type fault circling Earth."
A magnitude 12 would be 160 trillion tons equivalent, and would "fault Earth in half through center."
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.