Undersea slide set off giant flow

BBC News ^ | 22 November 2007 | Paul Rincon

[george76]

An enormous underwater landslide 60,000 years ago produced the longest flow of sand and mud yet found on Earth. The landslide off the coast of north-west Africa dumped 225 billion metric tonnes of sediment into the ocean in a matter of hours or days.

The flow travelled 1,500km (932 miles) - the distance from London to Rome - before depositing its sediment.

The work, by a British team of researchers has been published in the academic journal Nature.

The massive surge put down the same amount of sediment that comes out of all the world's rivers combined over a period of 10 years.

After blocks from the original landslide disintegrated, the sand and mud travelled hundreds of kilometres suspended in the water, without depositing any sediment on the sea floor that it had passed over.

Dr Talling likened this to avalanches in which the snow travels downslope in huge clouds.

A tiny drop in the sea-floor gradient (from 0.05 degrees to 0.01 degrees) eventually forced the flow to settle into a cohesive mass.

In places, the flow was over 150km (93 miles) wide, spread across the open sea floor.

[Fred Nerks]

Off the coast of North West Africa, close to southern Morocco and West Sahara lies a group of islands called the Canary Islands. One of its most western islands is called La Palma (the islands belong to the kingdom of Spain). La Palma is basically just a volcano. It has erupted many times (last time in 1971), and, although controversial, there are predictions of it being close to erupting again soon, with devastating results: it is thought to be very likely to dislodge a 12 mile-long slab of rock that will crash to the ocean floor, causing a dome of water a mile high, causing a tsunami, travelling at 500 mph...

Atlantis?

“But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.”

[george76]

It is impressive what some tsunamis have historically done.

Pushing water and everything else up fjords, big hills, across flat open spaces...

I saw a show of debris pushed up hills hundreds of feet in Alaska and the land slides under the ocean around Hawaii are very amazing ( to me at least ).

[Fred Nerks]

Scripps Institution of Oceanography/UC San Diego LINK

A crack is visible from the Gaviota slide (left) towards the Goleta slide (right) near Santa Barbara. Planned research deployments include acoustic geodesy transponders and nodes (yellow cubes and spheres), FOSS cables (red lines) and sediment cores (orange cylinders).

[geopyg]

Here in Washington State we had the floods from Lake Missoula - some of the large hills (200’ plus in height) near the Columbia River are actually ripple marks from the last flood! Here’s the website for the Ice Age Flood Institute:

http://www.iafi.org

[BIGLOOK]

Check out the lava bench that slipped into the sea a couple years ago. There one last summer too just not as big.

If you look at the Ko'olau mountains on Oahu, you'll see the semi circular pattern of a collapsed caldera.......the rest went below the waves. (And you can bet the farm that the seismic sea waves that followed reshaped the Pacific coastlines of three continents.)

[potlatch]

Lol, hey, we need that sand. I've read that some places are having artificial sand made out of colored glass pellets to replace what was lost in storms.

[george76]

Thanks.

That is a great picture.

[george76]

Thanks.

There were many interesting articles there.

http://www.mbari.org/volcanism/Hawaii/HR-Landslides.htm

[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]

thanks George76, blam, and Fred Nerks for pings and contributions. A "get readdddy to rummmmmble" ping.

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[happinesswithoutpeace]

Great article, bkmarked.

[george76]

Are you interested in this type of stuff ?

[george76]

Time to grab the space suit ?

[Professional]

Only if you can post some hot babes on a thread like this!

[george76]

ok

[potlatch]

I'm all prepared, lol. Have it floating around on a webpage somewere in space!!

[Gator113]

Are we all going to die again?

All my debts are paid off, so I need to know if I can run them up again.

[george76]

we may have another 60,000 years ?

[devolve]

.

Way out there!

[potlatch]

I can’t find the ‘moving one’ and that one has a fat face, lol.

Don’t know where I put it and I have tricked myself by putting ‘no right click’ on my webpages. Can’t even use my own urls now, lol!