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Mostly cloudy with a high of 80. The thunderstorms will roll in overnight / tomorrow AM (Weather.com says you can expect them around 7 in the morning).
So Gothamist ended up flipping to the Discovery channel last night, and, lo and behold, the Mega-Tsunamis show was on!
The early segments focused on the first recorded mega-tsunami, which occured one summer day in Lituya Bay, Alaska in 1958. And oh, it was a big one. A father and son fishing team lived to tell the tale of their boat riding the wave (others weren't so lucky): "And then I handed my son the lifejacket and said, 'Start praying.'" Weirdly, this was the first time scientists realized that landslides can launch tsunamis. Because these events cause much larger waves to be spawned, the "mega-" distinction was born. (Apparently earthquakes, the traditional tsunami source, do not in and of themselves produce tsunamis that meet that classification.)
Anyway, my real freak-out happened when the show transitioned from Lituya Bay to La Palma, a volcanic island that's part of the Canary Islands chain. It looks like we're in for it: one day, the western side of the Cumbre Viejo volcano will collapse into the sea, and a mega-tsunami moving at speeds up to 700+ kilometers per hour will reach the eastern shores of the United States in approximately 8 hours. Of course, they can't tell us when, but they insist that this event isn't "what if"--it will happen. As one scientist put it, if he were an American and saw on the news that the Cumbre Viejo volcano was erupting, he'd damn well be paying attention.
The next show on Discovery was about Krakatoa, which reminded Gothamist of one of her favorite childhood books, The Twenty-One Ballons. Somehow it's much easier to gawk at that 19th century disaster than it is to realize a mega-tsunami is breathing down your neck (no offense hurricane storm surge zones).
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Did you ever see the movie Krakatoa: East of Java? Krakatoa is actually west of Java but the producers thought "East of Java" sounded more dramatic and mysterious.
hilarious. have you heard rumors of this mega-tsunami waiting to happen, or is that outside of your field (and therefore totally meaningless ; )?
I wouldn't lose any sleep over mega-tsunamis. I haven't seen the Discovery Channel show but it appears like they are ignoring something important: geological evidence. There is no evidence in the geologic record that a mega-tsunami has ever occurred. That's a batting average of 0 for 4.5 billion years. It is unlikely that Cumbre Viejo is going to break that slump.
Cumbre Viejo is an active volcano. That means it is letting off steam, pun intended, fairly constantly. Most eruptions are small, some will be big. Maybe, just maybe, every few thousand years it will erupt violently. Huge eruptions like Krakatoa and Santorin caused big waves locally, but not globally. It is difficult to imagine how huge an eruption would have to be for a tsunami with 100 ft waves on the east coast.