"When La Palma goes." Topic

La Palma is one of the chain of Canary Islands. They are about 12,000 years old and Mt Teide on Tenerife (12,000 feet) is still a live volcano. The problem is a slab of rock on the island of La Palma. It weighs in at half a trillion tons and isn't as stable as many would like. Should it slide into the water, the recent tsunami would look like a wave you could paddle in.

The Canary Islands would vanish underwater immediately followed by a tsunami at the speed of sound across the Atlantic which would drown the Caribbean Islands and travel inland for maybe forty miles on the East Coast of America. Naturally much of the West Coast of Europe would suffer too. Deaths would be a hundred million or more if worse came to worse. So, what is anyone doing about it? Nothing!

Ehm. And what would you do about this then? Build a mile-high dyke around all population centres? Move the population centres on the American East Coast, Western Europe and while you're at it, also some of the caribbean etc. (a few hundred million to half a billion people) inland?

I've seen the documentaries as well.

A wave at the speed of sound, so the US and Europe would have a few hours' warning time. Not nearly enough to get anyone anywhere to safety, bar the people with quick access to aircraft or fast boats (to get to open sea asap)

But well, I don't really lose any sleep about it despite being in the European potential zone of destruction. It would redeal the world's economic cards nicely when the eastern US and western Europe would be basically gone.

I think if they superglue it in place, we all should be fine. That's stuff is tough!

For an opposing view See link

Quote
A collapse of Cumbre Vieja will not generate waves of up to 50 m. in height in Florida and the Caribbean islands, or more than 40 m along the northern coast of Brazil, . Mega tsunami generation from the postulated collapse of Kilauea is equally unrealistic. Waves of up to 30 m for the west coast of North America, and up to 20 m for the southwest Pacific are not possible. Proper modeling of dispersive effects (Mader 2001) – provides much more realistic far-field wave estimates, in the unlikely event of a large-scale, La Palma slope failure. Mader's model of a La Palma slide estimates that the east coast of the U.S. and the Caribbean would receive tsunami waves of less than 3 meters and the European and African coasts would receive waves less than 10 meters high. However, this represents the upper limit. Full Navier-Stokes modeling brings the maximum expected tsunami wave amplitude off the U.S. east coast to about one meter. Even with shoaling effects, a tsunami from a La Palma slide would still be of concern but does not present an unmanageable threat or a significant far field hazard.
End Quote

Well, it's one way to deal with the overpopulation of the Earth, anyway.

Honestly what do you want that mysterious 'anyone' to do? What resources are you personally willing to allocate?

Welcome aboard Kaneda. I see you are new here. From your first couple of posts it seems you might like to discuss current events so I will direct you over to the CA board under the Modern discussion topics. Those topics might be a bit more to your liking.

This was widely hyped by the BBC and CNN five years ago. There's been quite a bit of discussion since, questioning the analytic methodology and the motivations of the alarmists. Besides the site cited by Royal Air Force above, other points of view can be found starting here:

link

Rather an odd first post by a one-day member on TMP, don' you think?

Allen

don, what brand superglue use, can I get some, cause mine current batch is pants.

Isn't Gorilla Glue supposed to be good?

Why pants?

As long as it can't reach Wisconsin, I'm not going to worry about it.

The life of superglue can be extended by storing it in the refrigerator. It's a good habit to get into because it may take some time to cover all the weak spots of the Cumbre Viaja with superglue.

Surely someone can come up with a solution involving Future. That stuff can do anything, I tell you!

Can't be any more agressive than your standard hurricane here in the North East. I'd rather deal with 9 feet of water (3 M) than 2 feet of snow.

Approaching 5 inches of water in one day so far here…..have not seen the "end as we know it" yet.

Oggie
"Live Free or Die"

Wrap it in duct tape. Duct tape will fix anything.

Super glue? Bah.

Epoxy!

I don't tend to worry about this stuff and I live in Virginia. I have heard just about everything to be afraid of Dirty Bombs, Bio Attack, Airplanes hitting buildings, mass floods ect ect.

The reason I don't worry is because we can't live our lives in fear of what may happen. A guy I know (I see him at union meetings) is a survivalist. He told me once that he had a bomb shelter made out of those Concreate tubes they use for highway construction and that when the "commie's" (this was two years ago) invade and drop a bombs on us "he's ready" I laughed and said "when that happens I'll open a beer and sit with my wife on the porch and watch the thing come in. He was shocked and said that if I prepared now I could live I stated "I wouldn't want to because the only people left would be the people like you"

Gorilla glue bonds best with damp surfaces and rain is scarce in the Canaries. Anyone ever tried it with seawater? I'd go for expanding poly foam filler.

Has anyone ever worked out how much of a wave would get into the Med? I'm off to Barcelona tonight and I don't want to take any chances.

How is security on La Palma? I would think that a strategically placed conventional bomb could easily set it off without having to wait for an earthquake!

We need more glue!

CC

neo, pants=rubbish (UK).

I realised I used to get stuff from GZG, now i started using ZAP cos I don;t see GZG too often, maybe that is the problem

oh, la palma – sorry, hell, worry about it when/if it happens.

"How is security on La Palma?"

Inexistent. But it has good beaches.

If Matt Lauer says that La Palma pales in comparison to the "Supervolcanoes" and other planet-wide threats, well then this La Palma hype is nothin'. :)

link

CC

easy solution, move all the people on the costs of the important countries in boats out 30-40 miles past the continental shelf and have them chill until the tsunami passes under them….

Nah, the Shelf is 2-300 miles from the modern coastline on the East coast. 350 miles is 10 hours by boat (assuming you've got a fast one). In all honesty, they shouldn't need to get that far out. a 30m wave won't begin to break until there's less than 30m of water depth. That's a much closer distance.