Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Canary Islands Government Raises El Hierro Volcanic Alert Level - Irish Weather Online

Canary Islands Government Raises El Hierro Volcanic Alert Level - Irish Weather Online
Seen at Rantburg.
Also:
The fear for those not residing in the Canary islands is that this could, theoretically, cause a "mega-tsunami." (ISTR that Bruckheimer used one as a plot complication in CSI: Miami.*)
 Canary Island Mega Tsunami is a rather sensationalist article, apparently originally published in the Telegraph in 2001,which predicts that such an event
could flatten the Atlantic coastlines of Britain, Europe, North Africa and the United States of America and cause enormous damage to London and other UK cities....

Recently, scientists have realised that the next Mega Tsunami is likely to begin on one of the Canary Islands, off the coast of North Africa, where a wall of water will one day race across the entire Atlantic Ocean at the speed of a jet airliner to devastate the east coast of the United States, the Caribbean and Brazil.
The scenario seems to rely on a fairly large "what-if", that is, the entire volcano "twice the size of the Isle of Wight" collapsing into the ocean.

Still, I think I'll be avoiding the Atlantic Coast...
***
*AKA "The one with Emily Proctor."

3 comments:

NotClauswitz said...

My buddy in MA has this actual event as one of his major Phobias.

davidwhitewolf said...

IIRC that the scenario was based on what turned out to be really faulty wave modeling, as in several orders of magnitude off. That wasn't quite so well-publicized as the original claim, of course.

Sure, you'll get that kind of super-tsunami from a rockslide in enclosed Alaskan fjords and such, but the wide, wide ocean has a way of dissipating that kind of force. The island just ain't big enough to make that kind of wave that far away.

Drang said...

I find it highly likely that any given hazard has either been magnified or minimized. Reading the technical details of the specific conditions that have to exist for the "mega-tsunami" to occur, I suspect that it won't. But the media will prefer to say "Could occur!" without spelling it out, that might cause folks to watch something else...