A Wave of Destruction Will Destroy America's East Coast
By Ian Gurney
The Daily Express - UK
Around this time of the year many Britons look towards the Canary Islands for a sunshine break. What most don't know, however, is that on one of the Canary Islands lies a major global catastrophe in the making, a natural disaster so big that it could flatten the Atlantic coastlines of Britain, Europe, North Africa and the United States of America and cause enormous damage to London and other UK cities. Scattered across the world,s oceans are a handful of rare geological time-bombs which, once unleashed, create an extraordinary phenomenon, a gigantic tidal wave, called a Mega Tsunami. These are able to cross oceans and ravage countries on the other side of the world. The word Tsunami derives from the Japanese for harbour wave. They are normally generated by offshore earthquakes, sub-marine landslides and undersea volcanic activity, and range from barely perceptible waves to walls of water up to 300 feet high.
Recently, scientists have realised that the next Mega Tsunami is likely to begin on one of the Canary Islands, off the coast of North Africa, where a wall of water will one day race across the entire Atlantic Ocean at the speed of a jet airliner to devastate the east coast of the United States, the Caribbean and Brazil.
Dr Simon Day, who works at the Benfield Greig Hazards Research Centre, University College London*, says that one flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma, in the Canaries, is unstable and could plunge into the ocean during the volcano's next eruption.
Dr. Day says: "If the volcano collapsed in one block of almost 20 cubic kilometres of rock, weighing 500 billion tonnes - twice the size of the Isle of Wight - it would fall into water almost 4 miles deep and create an undersea wave 2000 feet tall. Within five minutes of the landslide, a dome of water about a mile high would form and then collapse, before the Mega Tsunami fanned out in every direction, travelling at speeds of up to 500 mph. A 330ft wave would strike the western Sahara in less than an hour."
Europe would be protected from the fiercest force by the position of the other Canary Islands, but the tsunami would still bring 33ft waves to Lisbon and La Coruña within three hours.
After six hours it would reach Britain, where waves up to 40 ft high would hit southwest England at 500 miles per hour, travel a mile inland and obliterate almost everything in its path. Even Britain's more sheltered shores, in the North Sea and Irish Sea, will be struck by smaller but still significant swells, causing widespread flooding in major coastal cities.
"We need better models to see what the precise effects on Britain will be." Dr. Day said. However, it is likely that London could suffer sever inundation as the Thames Barrier's ability to cope with such a dramatic rise in water levels exceeds its design specifications.
"The Thames estuary is already subject to major tidal surges," says Dr. Day, "and the Mega Tsunami could raise water levels by as much as 20 feet, with the surge travelling up the river at some 200 miles per hour." Devastation along both banks of the Thames would be huge, with many parts of the City and areas along both the north and south banks of the river as far as Putney Bridge and beyond experiencing severe damage. The effects on the London underground are hard to imagine, but the entire network would become flooded and the consequent loss of life would be immense."
Indeed, parts of London would be uninhabitable for perhaps months and the cost of repairing and rebuilding the damage would be astronomical. Imagine, if you will, what effects such a massive inundation would have on some of our major public buildings near the Thames; The Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Canary Wharf, Buckingham Palace, The Tower of London, and the South Bank are only a few of the many London landmarks that would be severely damaged, as indeed would the entire City of London.
However, the destruction in the United Kingdom will be as nothing compared to the devastation reeked on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Dr. Day claims that the Mega Tsunami will generate a wave that will be inconceivably catastrophic. He says: "It will surge across the Atlantic at 500 miles per hour in less than seven hours, engulfing the whole US east coast with a wave almost two hundred feet high " higher than Nelson,s Column " sweeping away everything in its path up to 20 miles inland. Boston would be hit first, followed by New York, then all the way down the coast to Miami, the Caribbean and Brazil." Millions would be killed, and as Dr. Day explains: "It's not a question of "if" Cumbre Vieja collapses, it's simply a question of "when".
