Megatsunami Scenario - La Palma Landslide

a slide from this mountain could kill millions of people in Europe and along America's eastern seaboard some eminent scientists warn that it's purely a matter of time till it happens this is the volcanic island of La Palma 700 miles of the northwest coast of Africa it's a newborn baby island barely past its 4 millionth birthday created in the last stage of what geologists call the rock cycle volcanoes can form land in various ways in Hawaii lava gently pours from vents in the ground to build up almost horizontal layers of new rock but elsewhere as here on La Palma more violent eruptions build steep-sided cones with surrounding layers of thick ash eruptions in the past 60 years have jolted this island to the core creating a fault line a crack you can walk through along the island central spine 6,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean on the western side of the fault the land fell 13 feet down then stopped geologists bill McGuire and other scientists say gas pressures could build up in a future eruption and crack open the island along this fault line they have traced the fault for at least nine miles along the island ridge and they believe the fault is so long that when it cracks open five hundred billion tons of rock will slide thousands of feet down into the ocean so it's going to go during a future option there's no doubt about that the problem is eruptions occur samples every 20 years some does every 200 years McGwire paints a terrifying fantasy picture of what anyone standing on the top of the landslide would see and here I don't know if anybody's heard the noise made by this amount of rocks sliding against against another great chunk of rock but I I always imagined it as if there are a million fingers scraping down a blackboard the slide will reach a speed of more than 220 miles per hour so you'd be hurtling down the slope of the volcano it would start to break up into into smaller pieces as it into the ocean but by then it would already ready have displaced something like half a mile of water which would be towering above your head and that would be probably the last thing you'd ever see spectacular way to die mcguire believes the impact with the ocean will create a dome of water nearly 3,000 feet high this is a massive rock which is probably bigger than Manhattan Island and when it collapses it would generate Oceanwide tsunami which will be at least as devastating as those that struck the Indian Ocean the vast amount of energy pumped into the ocean will create what one scientist has called a mega tsunami tsunami waves racing out in all directions computer predictions suggests they could even travel 4,000 miles toward the eastern seaboard of the United States losing some but not all of their power along the way that wave will travel all the way across the Atlantic Ocean for the east coast of North America but the water itself won't move all the way across the individual particles in the world would transmit the energy to one another we can demonstrate that quite nicely on a pool table here where the energy from this first ball I'm going to hit is transmitted through all the others to the last one just as energy moves from ball to ball so the landslide energy transfers from water particle to water particle across the ocean as the landslides energy approaches the coast it builds up into a massive wall of water these deep reds and blues are computer predictions of waves 100 feet high and more the level of destruction is is difficult to quantify it is going to be enormous there's no doubt about that if people are still in the cities when the collapse occurs you may be considering millions of casualties

Channel: Naked Science

Views: 2,927,177

Rating: 4.7604899 out of 5

Keywords: megatsunami, scenarios, la, palma, tsunami, landslide, geologist, prediction, nature, process, magma, hypothesis, future, eruption, generate, giant, wave, mass, evacuation, atlantic, ocean, usa, caribbean, massive, devastation, coastline, volcano, risk, modelling, topography, mapping, imminent, worst, hypothetical, disastrous, nightmare, evidence, fault, line, unstable, collapse, speculation, theory, rock, cycle, killer, threat, europe, america, eastern, seaboard, warning, geology, biblical, geological, phenomena, volcanic, island, armageddon

Id: 6utAunBKXV4

Length: 4min 48sec (288 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Thank heavens the UK got out of Europe just in time.

[u/Sturmundsterne]

No, it isn’t. It might happen. Someday. But there is no “expectation” of it occurring.

[u/wdwerker]

They debunked La Palma, Kilauea “Great Crack “ and Yellowstone caldera as eminent threats. All 3 will have something happen one day but they don’t have data pointing to anything dramatic in the foreseeable future. The property where the Great Crack is got bought by the Volcanoes National park but they are focused on getting the Park back open right now.

[u/OrbitalPete]

This research was debunked about 15 years ago. Tsunami models have come a long way since this was proposed in the 80s. We also suspect these large flask collapses are not instantaneous massive failures, but something which takes a little more time.

[u/EveryoneHasaSoul]

if this is really that imminent, could explosive experts bring down the bottom of the fault in stages so it wouldn't all slide into the ocean at once? i know nothing about explosives but i'd sign up to work on it if i get to blow up half an island, albeit in pieces

[u/arfbrookwood]

They could drop a couple of Jerichos on it and break it up Ironman style womp womp.