Slashdot Mirror
Cape Verde Boulders Indicate Massive Tsunami 73,000 Years Ago
TaleSlinger writes: Researchers from University of Bristol, UK found that boulders strewn 200m above sea level on Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa, were ripped from cliffs below and washed up there by a tsunami between 170m and 270m (550-850ft). Researchers at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory dated the tsunami at 73,000 years ago. It's interesting that this is about the same time as the Mt. Toba Eruption and about the same time humans nearly became extinct.
I thought they determined the mass extinction wasn't caused by Mount Toba. In fact when the original mass extinction was dated in the late 90s, they were putting it around 5,000-10,000 BC and many people wondered,"Hey, that's right around when Noah's flood struck where it is documented that the population of the world went down to 4 families."
Why is this even posted here? Extinction events are well documented, nothing new here...
>and about the same time humans nearly became extinct.
Can't be - there's at least one living right across the street.
That's not from the Nature letter; apparently that's some off-the-wall addition from the submitter.
Since the submitter hasn't figured this out... This was a localized mega-tsunami. An enormous volcanic-induced landslide caused a huge wave to hit a nearby island. Just like other mega-tsunamis that are known to have occurred in Hawaii and Alaska. The scientists aren't talking about some global catastrophe - it would've sucked to be on that other nearby island, though.
#DeleteChrome
Makes that Noah story sound slightly plausable...
I thought it was global warming caused by cow farts and elitists breathing heavy from carrying all that grant cash for more fake research.
Future generations will say that people like you were idiots.
Grab your long board dude.
Imagine living near a beach and seeing an 800 ft. wave coming at you. The fear would have been awful for a few seconds before you were slammed down under tons of water.
More likely they'll ask themselves how people like you could be so blind despite all the facts...
When the eastern flank of a Cape Verde volcano splashed into the sea some 73,000 years ago, it generated an enormous wave that rose to 170 metres of height before it crashed into a nearby island, geophysicists have discovered.
Why bother mentioning Mt Toba when the first sentence of that article explains where the tsunami came from?
Unlike a fracture line wave, we can expect the energy from a singular splash to decrease very rapidly with the distance.
No way it can cause a mass extinction.
The Cape Verde islands are a broadly similar island group, a thousand miles to the south. So a broadly similar history can be inferred - maybe Brazil would get hit a bit more, and Newfoundland a bit less. So you're now looking at events every quarter million years.
Don't forget the Azores, on the Gibralter-to-Mid-Atlantic transform fault. There;s sector collapse risk there too. And no small risk of sector collapses in the volcanic Carribean islands too, some of which could reasonably be expected to propagate out into the Atlantic too. Say a cumulative risk in the order of once every 100,000 years.
It is not news that these risks exist, and have existed for longer than humanity has existed. And there is nothing realistic that we can do about them. Except not live too close to coastlines.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"