The Coming Atlantic Mega-Tsunami 1068
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."
Videos of Asian Tsunami... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Videos of Asian Tsunami... (Score:3, Informative)
Add
Re:Videos of Asian Tsunami... (Score:5, Informative)
new mirror of South Asia tsunami vids (Score:3, Informative)
clicky [photosphere.org]
Why Worry? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Why Worry? (Score:5, Funny)
I always turn off the natural disasters when I play. I hate spending all that time building the city only to have Godzilla come crashing through
Re:Why Worry? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because everyone decided to not worry about an Indian Ocean tsunami. "It's unlikely to happen anywhere other than the Pacific Ring of Fire" they said.
Now we do the intelligent thing, which is learn from past mistakes. With a watch system like the one for the Pacific, we can mitigate the disaster.
Wouldn't we all feel real stupid if we decided to do nothing and an Atlantic tsunami hit?
Re:Arthur C Clarke worried (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Expect the Unexpected? (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
Re:Why Worry? (Score:4, Insightful)
And the thing is, they will have a point. Our resources are finite and there is no shortage of natural disasters. At some point you just have to roll the dice when allocating those resources, and sometimes it'll come up snakes eyes. That's life.
Re:Why Worry? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd point out that, by your logic, you should immediately kill yourself to better the planet. I would, but I've actually pronouced a few people who did that very thing.
I'd contend there's still time to change the road we're on. We don't have to go in for your psychotic comic-book villian death-to-humanity scheme to fix things.
And I'm a pessimist....
Re:Why Worry? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, I live with a number of birds and assume everyone is up on peculiarities of avian biochemistry.
Parrots have a much higher metabolic rate than humans. So the CO level that will kill a parrot is far lower than the level that will kill a human. Non-digital readout smoke detectors go off long after all the birds in the house are dead. With the digital ones, at least there's a chance I'll notice the readout before tragedy strikes, or at least figure out sooner why birds are dying. [shudder]
A friend and his wife and children were saved by the death of their parrot. The bird screamed, died, waking the father. He figured things out and got everyone out of the house in time. I think the kids only stayed in the hospital overnight as a precaution.
I should Ask Slashdot - is there a CO detector available or one that I could home-brew (would only be used as a backup - I've seen my soldering joints) that would alarm at a level I set?
(The non-digital readout CO detectors are cheaper, btw.)
Agreed (Score:4, Funny)
Like where? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Like where? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Like where? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why Worry? (Score:3, Insightful)
Live far away from coasts of major seas - no risk from tsunamis or hurricanes etc.
Live far away from tectonic plate edges - no earthquakes
Skip living in known tornado-happy areas
Did I miss something major?
Sure, if a rock falls from the sky, and you happen to be under it, that would Suck(tm), but by choosing where to live you can cut down the risk of natural disasters greatly.
In fact, nordic countries (with the potential exception of coast of norway) are generally pretty bening areas. Lots of stable
Wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Re:Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wikipedia (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Intentional Collapse (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Pedantic Mode On (Score:3, Interesting)
At least the one I am talking about, that is part of the United Kingdom.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ge
Re:Wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
See Tidal wave threat 'over-hyped' [bbc.co.uk] at the BBC web site, and this statement [sthjournal.org] 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
Quoting "Jack" from Fight Club (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Quoting "Jack" from Fight Club (Score:3, Insightful)
like the Buddha said, there is nothing that you cannot turn to your advantage; not even your own death.
Of course this comes up now. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Governments? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but when have we known the governments to respond sensibly about an upcoming major disaster?
Some bad science in the post (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Some bad science in the post (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Gwynne Dyer (Score:3, Insightful)
Finally, a good use for Florida (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Finally, a good use for Florida (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Finally, a good use for Florida (Score:5, Funny)
No chance. There too numerous.
What if...... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:What if...... (Score:5, Funny)
Poppycock. This topic hits close to home for me, because I myself happen to be a major international terrorist. You may remember me from such atrocities as the Chicago Fire, Mount Saint Helens, and Sinbad's movie career.
The simple fact is, at the end of the day we're slaves to ratings just like everybody else. I recently had to shelve several plans after they focus-grouped poorly, including infecting the world's dolphin population with AIDS to depress imperialist American schoolchildren, and mixing a healthy dose of Nair into the global shampoo supply stream.
That last one cost me a lot of money - my operatives had already commandeered a Vidal Sassoon supertanker in the Far East when I got the word from Saatchi & Saatchi that the operation was a lead balloon with hairline-conscious 18-35s in Jeddah's bellwether south side.
Lame sensationalism. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lame sensationalism. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mega-tsunami: Wave of Destruction
BBC Two 9.30pm 12 October 2000
Revisited: BBC Four 7pm 24 May 2003
The other article:
11 August 2004
Unstoppable Gee-Gees
By Gwynne Dyer
Perhaps the person pointing them out was looking for a tie-in to be sensationalistic, but both articles were written long ago, and were certainly attempts to educate about preventing the disasters of the type that just occurred.
see it in action (Score:5, Insightful)
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
This would be the greatest weapon ever. (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:This would be the greatest weapon ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Oh, well... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh, well... (Score:3, Funny)
Or
Wave Height (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Tsunami Tsimulator? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
So, if Osama gets a nuke... (Score:3, Interesting)
Links to Researchers (Score:5, Informative)
Now I can change my
Submitter was Wrong (Score:3, Informative)
I got some... (Score:3, Funny)
Insurance Agents (Score:3, Funny)
OVER-HYPED (Score:4, Informative)
Tidal wave thread 'over-hyped' [bbc.co.uk]
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"
Bah, this is nothing compared to when (Score:4, Interesting)
Yellowstone [solcomhouse.com]
The end of the US as we know it.
Enjoy,
Bad computer models exagerate La Palama tsunami? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Tsunamis (Score:4, Interesting)
Benfield Hazard Research Centre Tsunami Pages. Click on the last article there. [benfieldhrc.com]
The most interesting part IMO:
So just give these people some money, ok?
A pdf about tsunamis in the Atlanic. Link [benfieldhrc.com]
And off course the pics. Link [benfieldhrc.com]
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.Re:Tsunamis (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Lots of hype, poor science (Score:5, Informative)
read it [noaa.gov] 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.
Here's one idea. (Score:5, Funny)
Just get rid of it. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [crazyhorse.org] over a time frame of 65 years (and counting!), surely this is possible.
While we're on the topic (Score:3, Funny)
Anyone care to place a wager on the plot of the next crappy disaster flick?
Most scientists agree that this won't happen (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Early warning (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Early warning (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Early warning (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, does anyone think New York could be evacuated in 10 hours?
Re:Early warning (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Re:Early warning (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Early warning (Score:3, Interesting)
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
I saw this episode (Score:3, Funny)
All the while some cooky guy in circa 1960's hemp clothing, who says he's from the future, keeps stealing tricorders.
Re:Early warning (Score:5, Insightful)
Niether endorsing nor condemning it, just crossed my mind.
Re:Early warning (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Early warning (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Early warning (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Early warning (Score:4, Interesting)
And it will go 20 Kilometers inland.
couldn't that be handled on foot fairly reasonably?
Re:Early warning (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Early warning (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Early warning (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Early warning (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Early warning (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Early warning (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Early warning (Score:3, Interesting)
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 a
Re:Seems like true (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Seems like true (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Seems like true (Score:3, Insightful)
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 th
Re:People worry too much. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh Damn! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh Damn! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Oh Damn! (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway, the soil around downtown St. Louis is fairly loose with a lime stone base. If the right type of large earthquake hits in New Madrid, the entire soil base will turn to the consistancy of Jello. Many of the building downtown are still old double rowed brick that would just coll
Re:Oh Damn! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh Damn! (Score:5, Informative)
A magnitude 12 would be 160 trillion tons equivalent, and would "fault Earth in half through center."
Re:Oh Damn! (Score:3, Funny)
2. Megatsunami hits
3. Sell new beach front property!
4. profit $$$
Re:Straight Line Path (Score:3, Informative)
Looks like tsunami waves can diffract like any other kind of wave....
Re:Straight Line Path (Score:5, Informative)
This is highly dependant on wavelength to aperature ratio, which is why you can hear sounds around a corner, but not see around one.
Technical details (Score:4, Informative)
Massonetal01_ESR.pdf [geo.ub.es]
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) [ucsc.edu]
complete with illustrations that demonstrate that the Bahamas protect Miami, if not much else.
Re:Straight Line Path (Score:5, Funny)
Re:100 million? (Score:3, Informative)
If it would wrap around Florida, you could include the populations of Tampa, New Orleans and Houston (among others) for probably another 10 million.
Add in the populations of most, if not all, of the Carribean and the Canadian seaboard and you're probably now talking in excess of 75 million potential victims.
Keep in mind, in the U.S. about 2/3 of the population lives east of the Mississippi.
Re:100 million? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Pacific Northwest (Score:3, Insightful)
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...)
Re:crap (Score:3, Insightful)
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 a
sometimes obvious solutions don't work (Score:3, Insightful)
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