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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.
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.
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.
one has to wonder if we could defuse the problem by putting that mass in the water now, in a controlled manner. couldnt we start blowing off chunks of the island now and minimize the impact of any possible eruption?
clearly you would have to be very careful and the cost would be very high, but if everyone is certain that this mega tsunami is going to happen wouldnt it make sense to spend the money up front rather than on disaster relief?
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
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.
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.
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.
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.
See Tidal wave threat 'over-hyped' at the BBC web site, and this statement from the Tsunami Society:
....Volcanoes on La Palma ... and Hawaii", George Pararas-Carayannis, in Science of Tsunami Hazards, Vol 20, No.5, pages 251-277, 2002.
MEGA TSUNAMI HAZARDS
January 15, 2003
The mission of the Tsunami Society includes "the dissemination of knowledge about tsunamis to scientists, officials, and the public". We have established a committee of private, university, and government scientists to accomplish part of this goal by correcting misleading or invalid information released to public about this hazard. We can supply both valid, correct and important information and advice to the public, and the names of reputable scientists active in the field of tsunami, who can provide such information.
Most recently, the Discovery Channel has replayed a program alleging potential destruction of coastal areas of the Atlantic by tsunami waves which might be generated in the near future by a volcanic collapse in the Canary Islands. Other reports have involved a smaller but similar catastrophe from Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawai`i. They like to call these occurences "mega tsunamis". We would like to halt the scaremongering from these unfounded reports. We wish to provide the media with factual information so that the public can be properly informed about actual hazards of tsunamis and their mitigation.
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. NONE.
- 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.
Committee members for this report include:
Mr. George Curtis, Hilo, HI (Committee Chairman) 808-963-6670
Dr. Tad Murty, Ottawa, Canada, 613-731-8900
Dr. Laura Kong, Honolulu, HI, 808-532-6422
Dr. George Pararas-Carayannis, Honolulu, HI, 808-943-1150
Dr. Charles L. Mader, Los Alamos, NM, 808-396-9855
and all can comment on this or other tsunami matters.
For information regarding the Tsunami Society and its publications, visit: www.sthjo
We don't use "km" here, so that tsunami is just gonna have to go somewhere else with its commie agenda.