Posted on 05/14/2002 9:37:13 AM PDT by gcallah
Did anyone watch the Discovery channel on MegaTsunamis over the weekend? Basically, a huge chunk of the island of La Plama in the Canaries is in danger of collapsing into the sea, which would set off a tidal wave washing 12 miles inland on the east coast of the US.
I've heard from a contact in the Army that there are serious worries that bin Laden could try to set off a nuke on La Palma that would trigger the collapse.
Should Discovery have been allowed to show this? Should the US station troops on La Palma?
Doesn't sound to me like a nuke would be effective. About the only thing you could do would be to evacuate the East Coast cities asap.
However, it also doesn't sound plausible to me that the Cumbre Vieja event could be triggered by terrorist activity. This ridge is TWELVE MILES long, and it really seems to require widespread volcanic activity coming from below. This is the kind of event that really seems to require some major cooking.
Now if al Qaeda had a hundred nukes at their disposal, maybe. But if they did have a hundred nukes to blow, it would seem to be far simpler and surer just to plant 'em in a bunch of US cities.
Will the mega tsunami happen? By all accounts, yes. It's going to happen someday, and quite possibly during the next couple hundred years. We came breathtakingly close in 1949, when this half of the island slid for a dozen feet or so -- and then stopped.
But when it does finally happen, my personal opinion is that it'll be triggered by large-scale natural events, not by manmade activity.
Just my 2c on the basis of a little bit of reading. YMMV.
The result is your "shock wave" or breaking wave that can be 100 meters high.
So, at that point, it must be nonlinear. Is that correct?
Big time! Don't even think of analyzing it!
I did not know that "far out" the tsunami wave was fairly sinusoidal; I thought that it acquires some nonlinearity upon generation at the source. Thanks for clarifying that...
There is now a fourth of July terror concern.
Pa. local news had a small plane months ago fly around a nuke plant scramblers got there and no one knows where the plane took off from or where it came from?
No offense to your thoughts but should we all just surrender to fear and protect the skies for 24/7 forever? Where does freedom,fear and security end?
Unfortunately, dissipation also is order velocity squared, so the wave arrives on opposite shores of the ocean with virtually its entire initial energy, diminished only by 1/distance from circular spreading.
Sure, but if you were an Evil Super Villain, which way would you prefer? Panache is requirement for guild membership. Besides, even Al Qaeda knows that scantily clad women with vaguely sexual sounding names find Super Villains with diabolical plans irresistable. As they say, a Super Villainess in hand is better than 72 virgins in the bush. Or something like that.
There would also be a lot less traffic if you went out to sea instead of trying to run inland. The question I have is: How far out must one go to insure that the wave passes under your boat rather than over it? From simple observation one can see that larger waves tend to break farther from shore. Does a megasunami begin to break in 50 ft deep water? 100 ft? 200 ft? Is it possible that the megasunami would break so far out that it would expend most of its energy before reaching the coast?
And for certain you'd have that crazy Palestinian woman making that Arab tongue noise in celebration.
...BUT, if Tom Ridge intercepts the purchase receipts of bin laden's ACME Dynamite Kit soon enough, we could paint giant tunnel "openings" on the Rocky Mountains... Maybe, just maybe, we can still foil this dastardly bas*ard's plan.
I'm no tsunami expert, nor have I played one on TV, but I would suspect you want to at least be past the continental shelf. No problem on the east coast of Florida where the drop off is pretty quick, but on the west coast of Florida you have to go out over a hundred miles.
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