- Britain faces a natural disaster that will flatten the
Atlantic coastline for several miles inland, a scientist predicted this
week.
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- A massive landslide caused by a volcanic eruption in
the Canary Islands would create a giant wave that would hit the coast at
up to 500mph.
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- The largest mega-tsunami ever seen would be generated
when an eruption of Cumbre Vieja on the island of La Palma caused a part
of a mountain twice the size of the Isle of Man to plunge into the Atlantic.
"The first impact will be when 330ft waves crash into the west Saharan
coast of Morocco," said Simon Day, of the Benfield Greig hazard research
centre at University College London.
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- "It is not a question of if it will happen, only
when it will happen. It could be in the next few decades; it could be hundreds
of years hence."
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- Devastation from the tsunami was also highly likely in
Florida, Brazil and the Caribbean. There the wave would reach heights of
130ft to 164ft - higher than Nelson's column - and could sweep four and
a half miles inland.
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- Dr Day said: "It is a geologically definite process,
a bit like a pressure cooker, with the volcano heating up the ground water
and pressure building up inside the mountain."
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- In 1949 the mountain moved 12ft in two days, but the
disaster waiting to happen would be much greater, according to Dr Day's
report, published in Geophysical Research Letters.
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- The collapse of the mountain on the west of Cumbre Vieja
would release enough energy, equivalent to the electricity consumption
of America in six months, to generate a wave more than half a mile high
and tens of miles long. This would collapse and rebound on the Canaries.
As the landslide continued to move underwater, a series of waves would
develop, creating enormous surges all over the Atlantic.
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- "After only 10 minutes, the tsunami will have moved
more than 150 miles," Dr Day said. It would reach America in little
more than six hours.
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- There have been at least 11 tsunamis in the past 200,000
years, one of which wiped out the Minoan civilisation on Crete. The largest
recorded wave to hit Britain was the Lisbo tsunami of 1755, when 12ft seas
pounded Cornwall.
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- About 7,000 years ago, the Storegga tsunami, caused by
a landslide off Norway, deposited silt several miles inland of Northern
Scotland. "When the wave from the Canaries reaches Britain, it could
be as high as the Storegga, which may have been up to 60ft," Dr Day
said.
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- "It is difficult to know how far the ramifications
will go. We should be looking at the doomed civilisation of Crete when
assessing the effects."
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- http://www.telegraph.co.uk:
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