Tsunami: Why America's Coast Would Be Toast

[2Design]

http://www.cdnn.info/article/volcano/volcano.html

I was looking for something else and came across this article - thought others might be interested

It sounds like the plot of a fanciful Hollywood disaster movie. A dangerous volcano in the Canary Islands erupts, sends a giant tsunami travelling faster than a jet aircraft into the major population centres of America's east coast, killing tens of millions and wiping out New York and Washington DC. <snip>

[NMDemDist2]

1. i saw a Discovery thing on that very subject last year, but it was from

the Azores not the canarys

frightening to contemplate huh?

[Fovea]

2. How long will our hubris in the face of nature

protect us?
Not an instant, once nature decides she is through with us.

[Spinzonner]

3. On the bright side

I've read that a lot of fundamentalists are looking to colonize one of the Carolinas.

[Ellen Forradalom]

4. Then we'd declare a War on Volcanos

and send in the troops.

[DrWeird]

5. Just how big would a tsunami like that be?

If it's just a landslide, I wouldn't think it's be that big. I know there was that big landslide-generated tsunami in Alaska, but it was in a vary narrow harbor. This tsunami would have to travel several thousand miles to reach the east coast and would lose a good deal of it's energy. The big tsunamis, like the one that hit Kona in the fifties, are generated via earthquakes. The whole fault shifts, not just a single point landslide. It'd think those would carry a lot more energy.

[Salviati]

6. Here are some images from a simulation

Some images from a simulation of the landslide from a paper in Geophysical Research Letters

From Ward, S. N. and S. Day 2001. Cumbre Vieja Volcano -- Potential Collapse and Tsunami at La Palma, Canary Islands, Geophys. Res. Lett., 28, 3397-3400

http://www.iris.washington.edu/about/ENO/iows/2_2003a.htm