September 21, 2021

"Just hours after the Spanish island of La Palma rumbled and the volcano erupted, a theory about its wider repercussions began to gain strength, again."

"And despite the fact that the authorities, professionals, the Instituto Vulcanológico de Canarias and geologists from the National Geographical Institute deny it, the aftershocks of these claims continue to be felt.... According to the theory, if the island were to split in two, it would create a wall of water that would reach the coast of Portugal and southwestern Spain, which both lie to the north east. The waves could be up to 25 meters high, and would even cause damage to the south of England further north and then to the west they would reach the North American coast, as well as 'destroy the West African coast with waves of up to 100 meters,' according to the research."


50 comments:

Dave Begley said...

"In a 2011 peer-reviewed paper, U.S. Geologic Survey scientist Terry Gerlach summarized five previous estimates of global volcanic carbon dioxide emission rates that had been published between 1991 and 1998. Those estimates incorporated studies reaching back to the 1970s, and they were based on a wide variety of measurements, such as direct sampling and satellite remote sensing. The global estimates fell within a range of about 0.3 ± 0.15 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year...."

How much carbon dioxide is being released by La Palma? Can Jeff Bezos, Al Gore, Bill Gates and Joe Biden DO SOMETHING?

John henry said...

I blame global whatsit. We never had volcanoes or tidal waves or tsunamis before we started offending Gaia.

And can you even call them tsunamis anymore? Seems like cultural appropriation and racist.

I'm gonna send a note to Sleepy asking what we have to call them now.

John Henry

typingtalker said...

Collapses have happened in the Canary Islands, but they are very very rare, and the tsunami threat is local. The "mega tsunami" story for the whole Atlantic has been thoroughly debunked

https://en.as.com/en/2021/09/19/latest_news/1632069096_343081.html

Good to hear. Now I can go back to worrying about global warming.

WK said...

Make sure you have your mask fastened securely.

MikeD said...

Nobody trusts the "experts" any longer. Can't imagine why.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

I suppose the left are blaming volcanic activity on "global climate change ".. & "Human caused volcanic activity is.... SCIENCE!"

Temujin said...

Welp, there goes my seaside village escape in Portugal.
I will say that given the expert announcements from our government agencies over the past, oh...30 years or so, I'm not sure I buy any comforting words they might have. I'm not living in fear of it, but I have a hard time taking their word for anything.

Drago said...

We'll simply add the La Palma eruption to the next set of impeachment articles against Trump.

Howard said...

Isn't an explosive volcano. It's basalt with a low water content producing pahoihoi and aa flows. It's the light colored lava that's explosive.

Anonymous said...

bah!

That's a point source

Nothing stacks up to our "Big Rip" when 600 miles of fault gives at once off the coast of the PNW. Canada to California.

A 9.0 quake for 600 miles followed 20 minutes later by the mother of all walls of water. With every bridge, powerline, waterline and gasline broken in 100,000 square miles.

The last, on Jan 26, 1700, made the records in Japan as

"WTF, Tsunami, but no quake!"

gilbar said...

two things, first the serious one
In the olden days, they could have had a nubile virgin walk up, and into the volcano
Problem Solved! Good Luck being able to find one now! Stupid Sexual Revolution!!

Second, the snarky one
They say this will 'wipe out' MOST of the Atlantic Seaboard of the USA
They say this, like it would be a bad thing?

Heartless Aztec said...

Surf's Up hodads!

Mel Plontz said...

That's damn good surfin'!

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

More bad news for Biden to have to talk about. Somebody give that man a break.

Joe Smith said...

Surf's up, dude...gnarly...

TreeJoe said...

A fiction author named Jack Du Brul wrote a book where his geologist superhero-spy (Yes, you read that right) helped save the world by stopping this event from happening. First time I ever heard of it, so I looked into it.

It IS "extremely unlikely" per the experts. That's not to say it couldn't happen and it's not like the experts have a master grasp on everything happening under the earth. There IS unique geology there that positions a ridiculously large hunk of rock, that's very very steep, where if the island had a cataclysmic eruption that hunk of rock would split off and hit the ocean.

Water is non-compressible. So it would create an energy pulse wave the likes of which the modern world hasn't really seen.

To put this in perspective, because stuff like this HAS happened, look into the 1958 Lituya Bay megatsunami. Earth movement caused a rock landslide that created a wave that washed away trees up to an elevation of 1,700 feet. The difference there is that it was in a very small space - i.e. it was more a giant splash to the over side (1/2 a kilometer away) then it was a mega tsunami traveling thousands of miles.

Chris-2-4 said...

Ugh... "Further North"?

tim maguire said...

That's a pretty horrific scenario. When they say North America is not in danger at this time, I wonder how quickly that could change. Evacuation on that scale is probably impossible, so the real question is, is it speculation or is there some reason to think half the island could actually slip into the ocean?

Perhaps we should take some of the energy we're wasting on petty nonsense like global warming and refocus it onto the real climate change threats. Like volcanoes.

JK Brown said...

"then to the west they would reach the North American coast"

Tsunami are more a function of bathymetry after the initial displacement of water. You want to see the climate change alarmists go wild with claims, wait for a tsunami in the Atlantic to reach the relatively gentle slope of the US East Coast bathymetry. Look to see how tsunami impact Japan on the western side of the Pacific ocean. I say climate change alarmists because there will be widespread coastal flooding and the science won't matter to them....again.

Wince said...

"We're surrounded by liquid hot magma."

Václav Patrik Šulik said...

She cried, “Help, there’s danger near
Please open up the door!”
Then the volcano erupted
And the lava flowed down from the mountain high above
The soldier and the tiny man were crouched in the corner
Thinking of forbidden love
But the desk clerk said, “It happens every day”
As the stars fell down and the fields burned away
On Black Diamond Bay

Yancey Ward said...

Sure, the tsunami is a low probability event, but if it saves even just one life, we need to evacuate the east coast. Right?

FleetUSA said...

Oh me, global pollution, global warming. We need to redouble our efforts....Ha Ha Ha.

The earth is in control, not Congress nor this Administration.

Yancey Ward said...

Seriously, though, that is one impressive lava eruption.

tim in vermont said...

That would be just perfect, a tidal wave hitting DC.

Joe Smith said...

'Sure, the tsunami is a low probability event, but if it saves even just one life, we need to evacuate the east coast. Right?'

Everywhere except DC, Martha's Vineyard, Manhattan, and Kennebunkport.

tim in vermont said...

"The "mega tsunami" story for the whole Atlantic has been thoroughly debunked"

They use that word "debunked," but I am not sure they really know what it means. Still, it seems like the force of the wave will decline as the circumference of the "ring" grows, since it will further and further divide the force down as no new 'force' is being created. It *seems* implausible.

Mike Sylwester said...

Several months ago, I watched a television documentary about the possibility that the world as we know it might be destroyed by volcanoes. Various scenarios were described.

The scenario that I remember was that the the weight of polar ice suppresses many potential volcanoes. If enough polar ice melts, then those potential volcanoes eventually might erupt, causing even more ice to melt -- causing a vicious cycle of even more melting ice and even more volcanoes.

That was just one of several global volcanic catastrophes described in this superb documentary. I don't remember what the documentary was called.

tim in vermont said...

Cumbre Vieja would be stable enough according to the geo-mechanical models and stability analysis undertaken. For it to happen otherwise, a very high magnitude earthquake would have to occur simultaneously along with an eruption with a high explosive index.

I don't know. That doesn't sound like a "thorough debunking" to me, more like "we don't think it's gonna happen" level 'debunking.' It's not like their models are that good at doing hard stuff, like making predictions about the future.

Yancey Ward said...

The most dangerous flows are the hoi polloi flows and the aaaarrrgh flows.

typingtalker said...

I've heard this story somewhere before ... Oh yeah ... I remember now.

An in-house TEPCO report in 2000 recommended safety measures against seawater flooding, based on the potential of a 50 foot (15 m) tsunami. TEPCO leadership said the study's technological validity "could not be verified." After the tsunami a TEPCO report said that the risks discussed in the 2000 report had not been announced because "announcing information about uncertain risks would create anxiety."
...
A 2008 in-house study identified an immediate need to better protect the facility from flooding by seawater. This study mentioned the possibility of tsunami-waves up to 10.2 meters (33 ft). Headquarters officials insisted that such a risk was unrealistic and did not take the prediction seriously.
...
Japan, like the rest of the Pacific Rim, is in an active seismic zone, prone to earthquakes.


Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster
Wikipedia

rhhardin said...

I'm a thousand feet above sea level so might be safe, except for the coservation of momentum hitting a rising sea bottom and piling up water on top.

Big Mike said...

That would be just perfect, a tidal wave hitting DC.

Trump’s fault. Obviously.

BUMBLE BEE said...

Maybe we should raise taxes higher. That'll stop it!

ga6 said...

NO, No one of the Kennedys say the water will reach Prague unless all are vaxxed by next Monday.

Mark said...

Volcano erupts.

And there goes 20 years of careful planning and environmental sacrifice.

Lurker21 said...

Too many people. The island is capsizing.

Gospace said...

This is a prime example of just because it's been debunked doesn't mean it can't happen. Even as you read the article is says, basically, well this, this, and then that would have to happen... That it hasn't happened before isn't proof it will never happen.

John henry said...

Blogger gilbar said...

In the olden days, they could have had a nubile virgin walk up, and into the volcano
Problem Solved!


Sounds wasteful. We don't have enough nubile virgins and you want to waste one? Sent Stacy Abrams or Diane Feinstein instead.

John Henry

cubanbob said...

If there were to be a tidal wave from this eruption it would have occurred already. One less hysteria to concern ourselves with for today.

Narayanan said...

JK Brown said...
"then to the west they would reach the North American coast"

Tsunami are more a function of bathymetry after the initial displacement of water.
-----------
is that how / what can we figure out about speed of propagation for the waves?

I think that would be useful information to know - why the rush to debunk? why not inform? and build credibility.

Narayanan said...

So I went looking :

exhelodrvr1 said...

The evacuation would put a huge amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Better to let the people die.

JaimeRoberto said...

I wasn't worried about this until the experts told me there's nothing to worry about.

KellyM said...

In 2011 when the Fukushima quake occurred, a tsunami warning was issued and those of us immediately on the west coast were warned to keep away from the beach at that day's local high tide. National Park Rangers were stationed all along Ocean Beach here in SF attempting to keep the locals off the dunes. Yeah, that didn't work. I didn't bother walking down myself as I didn't want to get hassled by the rangers but others in my neighborhood did, and it was a big nothingburger.

The wave surge ended up being less than two feet above the normal high tide prediction. So much for the 'experts'. I'll believe them about as much in this instance as well.

tim in vermont said...

"In the olden days, they could have had a nubile virgin walk up, and into the volcano
Problem Solved!"

On the island of Crete, archeologists found that a stone roof that had collapsed on a priest who was in the process of cutting the throat of a young man at an altar, and there was an older woman watching the scene on the side. Maybe the kid wasn't actually a virgin like everybody thought, but it didn't actually appease Poseidon and stop the volcano and earthquakes that seem to have destroyed the Minoan civilization.

typingtalker said...

Forewarned is forearmed. Except for those living in the Greater New Orleans area.

Critical Events in New Orleans’ Hurricane History
Since the year 1759, 176 hurricanes have struck the Louisiana Coast
Frequency is about two hurricanes every three years
38 hurricanes have caused significant flooding in New Orleans
Hurricane Flooding frequency is about once every 6.5 years.

Why New Orleans

TheOne Who Is Not Obeyed said...

"That was just one of several global volcanic catastrophes described in this superb documentary. I don't remember what the documentary was called."

Whatever it was called, it should have been named "BS". If there is that much volcanic activity, the globe would be cooled and we would have more ice and (if this hypothesis was anywhere near to reality) fewer active volcanoes.

Tom said...

Portugal has been hit with a tsunami before and it was devastating.

Tina Trent said...

I live in the part of the country considered most resilient to natural disasters.

Plus we have the highest percentage of illegals per zip code.

All this suggests we should move the federal government here, no?