Hurricanes are Nowhere Near as Scary As This

Lost in 24/7 news cycle about a big name Hollyweird producer playing casting couch with any hot young aspiring actress he came across - not to mention assorted fruits, vegetables and barnyard animals - was a scary story out of the Canary Islands.  The Canary Islands, off the NW coast of Africa, are the home to La Palma a volcano that ought to scare the snot out of you if you live anywhere in the Western Hemisphere that's on the Atlantic or on water connected to it and under a few hundred feet in elevation.  If you live inland, and there's a ridge that high between you and the ocean, you're probably OK; otherwise, you might want to pay attention.

The islands of La Palma, Tenerife and Gran Canaria have now been rocked by 50 tremors after a “swarm of seismic” movement of low magnitude between 1.5 and 2.7 were measured. 

Express.co.uk reported on Tuesday the islands, popular holiday destinations with Britons, had been struck by 40 earthquakes in just 48 hours.

This is reminiscent of the earthquake swarms in Yellowstone over the last few months, which prompted a lot of "what if the Yellowstone volcano blows?" speculation.  Similar thoughts go here, but the threat is entirely different. 

The shape of La Palma hints that a likely scenarios is for the southwest slope of the volcano to slide into the sea.  This would create a tsunami that puts the 2011 Japanese tsunami into the "tiny" category.  Perhaps millions of cubic feet of rock and dirt sliding into the Atlantic at hundreds of miles per hour.  Displacing millions of cubic feet of water. 

The physics-based simulations of what would happen have yielded predictions for much of the Atlantic coast line.  Tsunamis behave differently in the open ocean than along beaches and shorelines and the shape of the underwater slopes cause the local effects that will be experienced.  The calculations predict tsunamis of 20 to 30 meters high along the entire US east coast, followed shortly by tsunamis of 10 - 20 meters along the gulf coast.  All this transpires about 7 to 9 hours after the volcano slides into the ocean.


Over the years, there have been many big budget movies based on the idea that some number of people suddenly find out they had days or hours left to live. The one kids talked about when I was in 8th or 9th grade was "On the Beach", about Australians waiting around after a thermonuclear war, knowing they all would die.  Much more recently, "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" both showed society waiting for Earth to be hit by a recently discovered comet.  The reality of a big slide is something like the last two, waiting for the impact tsunami to hit.

Are you in a position where you could get to a couple of hundred feet elevation in a short drive?  How about in under 8 hours?  You'd have to be ready to hit the road the moment you heard the volcano blew.  Every reporting station in the area would be wiped out, but other seismographic stations would report quickly.  Like so many other situations, it would be better to leave an hour early than a minute late.  We've just seen the problem in Florida during the Irma evacuation.  There's really only two highways out of the state.  It seems that being on one of Florida's highest elevations might be enough to survive. 

Either that, if you have a boat, get in the boat and prepare to be buffeted around by currents and floating debris.  From what I recall seeing of the Japanese tsunami in 2011, the "seas" in the sense of waves are not a problem, it's the floating crap and obstacles.  Those are NOT trivial, but nothing about this scenario is.