The horrible megatsunami, coming soon...

[quarky]

Screw the megatsunami - it's the Zombie Apocalypse for me, all the way

I hear you.

The thing with dramatic, apocalyptic doomsday scenarios, is that you have to pick one, and ride it to the end...like your local football team..no matter how unlikely its victory. (In this example, victory=total crushing doom for all.)

If you believe in 2 or more doomsdays, it gets diluted and the whole threat loses credibility.

Yet, its possible that we might have some hybrid doomsday scenarios available.Any suggestions?

 

[MG1962]

I have Simon Winchester's book regarding the Krakatau event. The Dutch were able to get telegraphic messages out within a couple of days of the event. And it was indeed devastating; it is believed that the culminating explosion was the loudest sound ever heard by human beings (it was heard almost three thousand miles away.)

I don't think anyone could have written a duller book about such an amazing topic. He gets side tracked over and over. When he gets on topic his information is very well researched. I did like his in depth discussion about the previous historical eruptions.

I'd also highly recommend Krakatoa Volcano of Destruction

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0791318/

An extremely well produced docu-drama made by the BBC a few years ago. The depiction of the final explosion is shown from a purely human perspective, very powerful television.

 

[celestrin]

Show me a cubic mile landslide.

This valley/bay is not a rim of some volcanic crater or even a caldera.
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/6558897
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/ValleElGolfo.jpg

The big chunk of Hierro island went missing in a landslide event which had a volume of some 150-180 km³.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Hierro#Landslides_and_tsunami
But it didn't happen at once, it apparently took a few days to transpire.

Here's more on the Canaries landslides.
http://geomar.geo.ub.es/eurodom/documents/Massonetal01_ESR.pdf

If you'd settle for non Canaries landslides, there's the Storegga slides with a volume of some 3,500 km³.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide
It seems a tsunami from one of those carved out the Northern sea and contributed to making Britain an island.

Hawaii have their own collapsing islands, this from the pdf above.

In the Hawaiian Islands, landslide-related tsunami with run-ups exceeding 300 m on adjacent islands have been recognised, although it should be recognised that Hawaiian landslides can be up to an order of magnitude larger than those discovered around the Canaries.

As for such slides generating megatsunamis, capable of making an island out of the Appalachians, I'm not sure that can happen. Perhaps by some extra terrestrial objects. But if one of those Norwegian thingies breaks, or La Palma decides to go all at once, I probably wouldn't want to be stroling down the Atlantic City boardwalks at the time. Well, AC might not be in terrible danger of Storegga slides, as there's Iceland, Greenland, New Foundland in the way, and there are some seamounts between the Canaries and N America, which might dissipate that threat. On the other hand, news from a few days ago show that seamounts might actually augment the effect.
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/doubletsunami.htm

And this is an 8 cubic mile slide that probably didn't cause a tsunami
http://daveslandslideblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/landslide-of-them-all-saidmareh-iran.html

 

[Correa Neto]

I hear you.

The thing with dramatic, apocalyptic doomsday scenarios, is that you have to pick one, and ride it to the end...like your local football team..no matter how unlikely its victory. (In this example, victory=total crushing doom for all.)

If you believe in 2 or more doomsdays, it gets diluted and the whole threat loses credibility.

Yet, its possible that we might have some hybrid doomsday scenarios available.Any suggestions?

Sure.

Volcanoes erupting zombies. Flows of creeping lurching zombies coming out of the crater, zombies falling from a cloud of pyroclastic zombies towering high in the sky...

Volcanic gases turning people in to zombies. Hey, this might even make in to a SyFy flick!

 

[Hellbound]

I think the major impact is from sea-water flooding into the void and flash-boiling. That would stir things up a bit.

I see what you mean. However, there certainly was an incredibly large tsunami. The sibsidence of the island is rather self evident, but I suppose there's room for speculation as to the exact mechanism that led to the tsunami.

When I imagine this event in my mind, I see the (rather large) island breaking up and collapsing to form a caldera, and suddenly a very large area that was previously above sea level is now below sea level. It seems to me that the ocean compensates in the form of tremendous quantities of seawater - an extremely local mega tsunami if you will - rushing inwards to fill the empty space. Based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of fluid physics, I predict that this roughly ring-shaped wave would come together in roughly the center of the (now filled) space, perhaps building from momentum to a significant height at the focus, at which point the momentum would reflect outwards as a second large ring-shaped wave spreading away from the scene. Does this sound plausible to anyone?

Good points, both We need a geologist and a physicist, and maybe a dozen other -ists I haven't thought of yet

 

[MG1962]

Good points, both We need a geologist and a physicist, and maybe a dozen other -ists I haven't thought of yet

I believe Corres is a geologist - we also have Dinwar but I've not seen him around the last week or so

 

[quarky]

Sure.

Volcanoes erupting zombies. Flows of creeping lurching zombies coming out of the crater, zombies falling from a cloud of pyroclastic zombies towering high in the sky...

Volcanic gases turning people in to zombies. Hey, this might even make in to a SyFy flick!

Good, but is there any chance of a meteor causing mass zombification?
I like my apocalypse to come from outside the planet.

 

[Hellbound]

Good, but is there any chance of a meteor causing mass zombification?
I like my apocalypse to come from outside the planet.

The meteor was buried in the magma chamber of the volcano from an impact eons ago.

The heroes have to don special lava-proof suits and travel to the center of the earth, where the meteor ended up due to an earthquake, to save the world.

Have I included enough illogical nonsense to make it a true ScyFy original yet?

 

[Correa Neto]

Doable.
Would you happen to enjoy a meteor zombifying a mammoth?
Lo and behold!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0487037/plotsummary

 

[Checkmite]

I don't think anyone could have written a duller book about such an amazing topic. He gets side tracked over and over. When he gets on topic his information is very well researched. I did like his in depth discussion about the previous historical eruptions.

I'd also highly recommend Krakatoa Volcano of Destruction

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0791318/

An extremely well produced docu-drama made by the BBC a few years ago. The depiction of the final explosion is shown from a purely human perspective, very powerful television.

I've got the Winchester book as well. His book is the only modern written detailed treatment on the event, so there's that. But I did notice one particularly glaring error - regarding the end stage of the eruption. He refers to it as a final, culminating and tremendous explosion. In fact there were four tremendous explosions, separated by around an hour each IIRC (not 100% sure) and the loudest and most powerful was the third one, not the final one. If someone wants to try and work out what was physically happening at the volcano, that's an important detail. I did, however, like Winchester's treatment of social conditions in the aftermath, particularly with regard to how the locals came to blame the Dutch for the devastation. I don't think anyone else has covered that topic.

As far as the details and specifics and all that, nothing beats going to the library and hitting up the Simkin-Fiske book. It has everything one could possibly want, from eyewitness accounts to comparative graphs and maps to navigational sounding charts from before and after the explosion to scientific studies of the remnant archipelago - including the return of lifeforms. It's too fascinating.

Just in case we haven't geeked enough over how powerful the explosions were, one of them (not necessarily the third, loudest one) created a distinctive barometric pressure wave that ricocheted between the source and it's global antipode seven times before it was too weak to detect.

 

[quarky]

Doable.
Would you happen to enjoy a meteor zombifying a mammoth?
Lo and behold!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0487037/plotsummary

satire is becoming impossible. they're always one step ahead.

 

[nota]

if the Canaries volcano goes into the sea
the bahamas shallows will protect miami

you can't have a mega wave in shallow water very long/far
miami would be spared the worst of a trans-Atlantic wave
even a real big one so flooding maybe
building crashing walls of water no way

 

[wobs]

I recall the program in the OT. Think it was about 10 years ago.
I also recall a friend of mine explaining to some kids that it wouldn't affect us in Hull, despite what a teacher had told them.

On a similar tone though, I recall a program about super volcanoes and how a tsunami caused by an eruption in the Krakatoa region severely damaged a dam or irrigation system in the middle east, and caused a mass migration of people, as their system was in collapse. This lead to a major growth in Islam.

The above could be nonesense of course, but would be interested if anyone else remembers this, or can say either way if there is any truth in this.

 

[quarky]

Enormous methane plumes are opening up in Siberia.
Bigger than expected.

We are so doomed.

 

[Hellbound]

Enormous methane plumes are opening up in Siberia.
Bigger than expected.

We are so doomed.

Easy enough to fix. Just toss in a match and burn them off!

 

[quarky]

Easy enough to fix. Just toss in a match and burn them off!

Not sure about that. Its not being done, from what I've read. It would still put CO2 in the atmosphere.

 

[Hellbound]

Not sure about that. Its not being done, from what I've read. It would still put CO2 in the atmosphere.

Sorry, the was intended to convey the idea that I was joking.

Maybe they could drop in a few tons of Bean-O?

 

[quarky]

Sorry, the was intended to convey the idea that I was joking.

Maybe they could drop in a few tons of Bean-O?

Sorry, I missed the joke because it seemed like an obvious solution to the CH4 problem. We'd be better off burning it, even with the extra CO2 in the air.

These vents are in pretty remote areas of thawing tundra and water and ice, and look bad as per harvesting the gas. I suspect the methane emerges as bio-gas; methane hooked up with H2O and other stuff. Sometimes, its barely flammable.

Meanwhile, I'm looking into Beano.