Their WILL NOT be a Tsunami that hits the US from the Canarys

With all this talk on the forum about Tsunami's and in-particular two posts on the threat to the U.S from the canary Islands I'm posting this.

I've tried mentioning in the other threads that the scientist who came up with the mega-tsunami theory has been attacked in the geological world, but nobody seemed to listen, anyway here is the some of the article and the link. Take a look and see what you think, personally I side with this guy.


Link:
Southampton Oceanography Centre

Canary Islands landslides and mega-tsunamis: should we really be frightened?

What is the reality behind stories of mega-tsunamis wiping out the American east coast and southern England? Very little, according to Dr Russell Wynn and Dr Doug Masson from Southampton Oceanography Centre, who have been studying Canary Islands landslides for many years. Their research has shown that stories of a devastating 'mega-tsunami' some 300 feet high and travelling at 500 mph are greatly exaggerated, and that reports suggesting tens of millions of people could be killed have little basis in reality.

"By analogy, if you drop a brick into a bath you get a big splash, but if you break that brick up into several pieces and drop them in one by one, you get several small splashes. Therefore a multi-stage failure would certainly not generate tsunamis capable of damaging the coastlines of southern England or the American east coast, although they may have an impact on nearby Canary Islands."

[edit on 4-1-2005 by Rock Hunter]

the scientist with the alarmist doomsday scenario was suggesting the entire chunk would slide off into the sea. if you have a one huge piece, I would imagine the scenario is possible. also, if you have the whole thing slide off in pieces that all fall at once it will be very similar to the entire piece coming down at once.

Personally, I'm not worried about it, even if my 16th floow NYC apartment might become oceanfront property.

yes your right, But what the geologist is saying makes sense, it is very unlikley for it all to give way at the same time to create one "large piece" and it is very unlikely for all the small pieces to fall at the same time.

Rock, with three undergraduate courses, none of which were marine or seismology, I am certainly not going to enter a urinary olympiad -- especially with folks who do this for a living.

And I certainly believe any stories about a Harbor Wave with a one-hundred-meter-high runup are bogus.

However, If you look at long-frequency terms, such a tsunami is possible if not probable within the short term (say 100 years). Look at Lisbon in 1755, and the Maritimes tsunami this century (oops, I mean last century! The 1900's, anyway.).

One other thing I read about that might be worth noting: the post-glaciation rebound phenomenon.

I'm sure you're aware that millennia of glaciation can actually compress the land under its weight, and, after the glaciers melt, the land begins to rebound (although it does so slowly; we are talking geology here).

I think there's a lot of evidence, from the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec and Ontario all the way down to Chesapeake Bay, of ongoing geological rebound after the melting of the Pleistocene glaciers.

If the current thinning of the arctic ice-pack in Greenland continues, what kind of rebound-driven earthquakes can we expect a couple of thousand years from now?