Millions In U.S. Face Mega-Wave From Island Collapses

A chunck of a volcano started to slide into the ocean in 1949. If it falls into the ocean it could mean catastrophe for the millions of people on the eastern coast of the United States. It could create a mega wave 100 meters high racing across the atlantic towards the eastern seaboard.

LONDON (Reuters) - The bad news is tens of millions of people along the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada may drown if the slow slippage of a volcano off north Africa becomes a cataclysmic collapse.

But the good news is the world is not likely to be destroyed by an asteroid any time soon.

This could happen sometimes in the next thousand years. Scientist Bill McGuire doesn't think that Americans are taking it seriously, but he thinks they should be. McGuire believes that the Spanish and American goverment should fund the monitering of the volcano.


Reuters

I watched a show about this on the History Channel or Discovery, entitled "Tsunami" that was shown in a natural disaster marathon. Very interesting... a whole half of the island is on the verge of sliding off into the sea. Now that would be a creative weapon for terrorists.

The volcano collapse would also seriously affect the UK.

The Scotsman

The wave-front from the collapse would spread out in a crescent, striking the west African coast with a wall of water more than three hundred feet high in two to three hours.

Its northern side would also brush against Europe. Within three to four hours, a 33ft high wave would smash into the south coast of England, causing immense damage.

Unlike a normal wave, the tsunami would not break rapidly but just keep coming, said Prof McGuire.

�You�re not talking about the destruction of the UK economy, but very serious damage along the south coast,� he said.

Trying to stop the mountain collapsing was simply out of the question, he said.

He had done a calculation which showed it would take 35 million years to dig out the dangerous part of the volcano and move it away.


zero lift

Originally posted by Tanin
I watched a show about this on the History Channel or Discovery, entitled "Tsunami" that was shown in a natural disaster marathon. Very interesting... a whole half of the island is on the verge of sliding off into the sea. Now that would be a creative weapon for terrorists.

I saw that on National Geographic Channel.
I sure hope they make good work of monitoring that volcano, not only to check when it might slide, but emagine this:

A Terrorist organisation sees the same Documentary as we did. He sees all those nice places in the middle of nature where noone would be able to monitor him and his palls and gets the most brilliant idea a terrorist could get.

He gets some buddy's of his together and starts planning where to put charges along the breach in the volcano, on the TV show alone I saw a douzen places noone would ever see you do your thing and heck, if they did see, you could act asif your a research team doing drills to check the place out.
He assists nature in letting the volcano slide, its already ready to slide, so not much explosive power is really needed to make it go.

Next thing you have a 100 meter high tsunami making its way to the US and a whooping lot of other places. When it hits, really big $hit hits the fan on the US coastline.

The US shouldn't be pushed to monitor that place. They should be doing it already. Its a place outside of US soil that if used by terrorists could mean utter catastrophy comming their way.

South America would also be be effected along with Greenland etc

Originally posted by thematrix

I saw that on National Geographic Channel.
I sure hope they make good work of monitoring that volcano, not only to check when it might slide, but emagine this:

A Terrorist organisation sees the same Documentary as we did. He sees all those nice places in the middle of nature where noone would be able to monitor him and his palls and gets the most brilliant idea a terrorist could get.

He gets some buddy's of his together and starts planning where to put charges along the breach in the volcano, on the TV show alone I saw a douzen places noone would ever see you do your thing and heck, if they did see, you could act asif your a research team doing drills to check the place out.
He assists nature in letting the volcano slide, its already ready to slide, so not much explosive power is really needed to make it go.

Next thing you have a 100 meter high tsunami making its way to the US and a whooping lot of other places. When it hits, really big $hit hits the fan on the US coastline.

The US shouldn't be pushed to monitor that place. They should be doing it already. Its a place outside of US soil that if used by terrorists could mean utter catastrophy comming their way.

I suppose it's a good thing we're not terrorists, eh?


[edit on 8/9/2004 by Tanin]

I found an interesting pdf for those that are extremely geologically inclined (it even has calculus in it).

www.es.ucsc.edu...


Here's an image from the file that depicts the wave at 6 hours post slide. (77K image)



[edit on 8/9/2004 by Tanin]

There is geologic evidence in the Hawaiian Islands from waves as high as 1,000ft that were the result of pieces of island breaking off. This could create a lot of damage but certainly is not expected.

I'm wondering why this all over the papers now? It's old news, I heard about it years ago and it must of been known about long before I heard it.

does anyone agree with me that those wave height estimates might be a bit exagerrated??

Originally posted by kegs
I'm wondering why this all over the papers now? It's old news, I heard about it years ago and it must of been known about long before I heard it.

Same here!! It could happen within a thousand years!!! why all the scar mongering now? Always confuses the hell outa me! What's up with that!? It's as if the news, and people are just looking for something that says DOOM

For goodness sake, will someone just jump up and down on it a bit so it collapses!
The suspence is killing me....

Originally posted by victor was right
does anyone agree with me that those wave height estimates might be a bit exagerrated??

Actualy, seeing the National Geographic Docu about it, the estimates are quite soft.

The callculations made are for when that landmass simply slides into the ocean. This estimated trough practical tests and mathematical models.
They did't take any other factors into account in the docu, except the slide.

One of the things they said was that the force could be much bigger because when the slide first starts, water could flow into the fault line of the volcano and make contact with magma, creating additional force to the slide by producing masive amounts of steam.

There are other factors that come into play too, like what the water level is when the event happens. The difference between low and high tide gives another boost to the event, where at high tide, more water will be moved, at low tide, less water will be moved.

Its really scary to see that nature is once again getting ready to show us its the master of us and that we, although we think we do, aren't the masters of nature.

Originally posted by Netchicken
For goodness sake, will someone just jump up and down on it a bit so it collapses!
The suspence is killing me....

I think that in 2 years (After they develop the 30,000 lb bunker buster bomb) that they should find the best place on the mountain and fire.

The debri would be rocks and dirt that goes flying in all directions.

The result would be no more potential disaster, because when pieces of it fell into the water it was just alot small water ripples, instead of one big one.

Wouldnt the energy you would need to blow this chunk of rock into the water be on a really huge scale. Im mean earthquakes or volcanos will move it but will anything short of a couple nuclear weapons move it?

I just remebered we have a super volcano under Yellowstone That could wipe out most if not all of the west coast. Then we have the threat of a giant wave on the East coast.


Who needs enemies when you have mother nature

Reading the paper Tanin posted you can see that the volume of rock they are talking about is on the order of 150 to 500 cubic kilometers. If it is mostly Basalt, density ~ 3.3 g/cc, that's 3.3x(150 to 500)x(1,000,000cc/cubic meter)x(1,000,000,000cubic meters/cubic kilometer)/(1000 g/kg)=3,300,000,000,000x(150 to 500)=495,000,000,000,000kg to 1,650,000,000,000,000kg. Divide by 2.2 kg per pound, that's 2,250,000,000,000,000 to 750,000,000,000,000 pounds or 1,125,000,000,000 to 375,000,000,000 tons of rock. Thats a big rock. Aint no nuke gonna move that baby. When it goes, it will go with great enthusiasm, and aint no one gonna stop it. There is another paper out there, I found it last week, but I can't seem to locate it today, describing a series of experiments investigating the creation of waves using this type of mechanism, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. Results support the conclusion that if this baby goes, you best be well inland. Hope my math is right above, shouldn't be too far off.

Yes I agree. Nothing can remove it or stop it. The best thing is monitoring and an alert system much like the geotech monitoring done on dams along with GPS to detect surface movement. Data could be beamed real-time very inexpensively to a monitoring station already set-up to watch for tsumanis. It'd prolly take a team about a week to install and need one dedicated pentium 4 machine. Geokon makes several devices for measuring lateral, and verticle movement as well as pressure variables.

But, what they are not telling you is that there are methane in deep-sea reservoirs. Some are of the coast of Africa. And the said landslide would cause the release. Some believe that these gasses stopped the Ice age.


A hot theory about how the Ice Age ended has got a frosty response at a meeting of the leading European and American geoscience societies in France.
news.bbc.co.uk...


Also, may have killed all of prehistoric life.

Huge reservoirs of methane trapped beneath the ocean floor rapidly escaped during prehistoric global warming and depleted much of the sea's oxygen, according to new research into why many forms of life suddenly vanished 183 million years ago.
www.cnn.com...

Methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas. In its solid, ice form, called methane hydrate, it is stored in large amounts below the sea floor. Some signs indicate that there have been repeated intense undersea methane emissions over the course of the Earth's history. Often, these emissions appeared to be linked to climate changes, species extinctions, and biological cataclysms both in the oceans and on continents. In the coming issue of the journal Science, Prof. Kai-Uwe Hinrichs from the DFG-Research Center Ocean Margins Bremen/Germany and his colleagues from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) present new insights related to methane emissions in the recent past. According to Hinrichs, who was only recently appointed to the Bremen research center, multiple rapid, intensive eruptions occurred in the warmer phases of the last ice age on the North American Pacific coast. Undersea melting of methane ice and landslides could have been the causes of these events, which resulted in oxygen depletion in the ocean.
www.rcom-bremen.de...

Originally posted by Big Erle
Reading the paper Tanin posted you can see that the volume of rock they are talking about is on the order of 150 to 500 cubic kilometers. If it is mostly Basalt, density ~ 3.3 g/cc, that's 3.3x(150 to 500)x(1,000,000cc/cubic meter)x(1,000,000,000cubic meters/cubic kilometer)/(1000 g/kg)=3,300,000,000,000x(150 to 500)=495,000,000,000,000kg to 1,650,000,000,000,000kg. Divide by 2.2 kg per pound, that's 2,250,000,000,000,000 to 750,000,000,000,000 pounds or 1,125,000,000,000 to 375,000,000,000 tons of rock. Thats a big rock. Aint no nuke gonna move that baby. When it goes, it will go with great enthusiasm, and aint no one gonna stop it. There is another paper out there, I found it last week, but I can't seem to locate it today, describing a series of experiments investigating the creation of waves using this type of mechanism, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. Results support the conclusion that if this baby goes, you best be well inland. Hope my math is right above, shouldn't be too far off.

Thanks for the interesting computation. You are right about the mass. However, there some really big nukes out there (100 megaton ones) that are capable of demolishing this kind of rock. This has been done in Russia on one of their northern islands (most of which was literally evaporated).

Of course, a nuke of that caliber would create a tsunami wave itself


So there is catch 22 here for sure.