Usually from October to February, many Europeans 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, parts of continental Europe, North Africa and the USA, and cause enormous material damage and loss of life.
Recently, scientists have come to the conclusion 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 Center, University College London*, says that one flank of the 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, traveling at speeds of up to 500 mph. A 330ft wave would strike the western Sahara in less than an hour."
Most of mainland 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
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, 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 Florida, 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".
For more: EU-Digest
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