Waves of Death
You gotta wonder--would it be like that storm surge in NYC in "The Day After Tomorrow?"

THE INDEPENDENT--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.

But unlike the eruption in the 1997 film Volcano (which threatened in its tagline that 'the coast is toast') scientists believe the threat from the volcano of Cumbre Vieja on the island of La Palma is real, and that it could send a massive slab of rock twice the size of the Isle of Man crashing into the Atlantic. The effect would be to generate a huge wave with the energy equivalent to the combined output of America's power stations working flat out for six months.

After travelling across 4,000 miles of the Atlantic for about nine hours the tsunami would hit the Caribbean islands and the east coasts of Canada and the US with devastating effect. It would stretch for many miles and sweep into the estuaries and harbours for up to 20 miles inland, destroying everything in its path.

Those scientists are warning that the US government is not taking the threat from Cumbre Vieja seriously enough and not enough is being done to monitor it. Professor Bill McGuire, the director of the Benfield Grieg Hazard Research Centre at University College, London, warned that Boston, New York, Washington DC and Miami could be virtually wiped out.

Professor McGuire said close monitoring might at best provide two weeks warning of the disaster but that despite knowing about the danger for a decade, no one was keeping a proper watch on the mountain. The two or three seismographs left to pick up signs of movement in the rock were not capable of detecting a looming eruption weeks in advance, Professor McGuire warned. "What we need now is an integrated volcanic monitoring set up to give maximum warning of a coming eruption. The US government must be aware of the La Palma threat. They should certainly be worried, and so should the island states in the Caribbean that will really bear the brunt of a collapse. "They're not taking it seriously because terrorists are not behind the plot. Governments change every four to five years and generally they're not interested in these things," he added.

- nostradamusfunkadelic, 9:45 AM | |