It's the only way
Nuke the Cumbre Vieja volcanic on the Canary Islands from orbit. 100 megatons should do it.
Geneva devastated by monster tsunami, millions at risk
Geologists have found the culprit behind a huge tsunami that devastated the site of the Swiss city of Geneva in 563 AD and say a similar wave could be in the city's future. "Out of its banks it devastated villages with very old men and herds, it even destroyed many holy places with their priests and rose with fury over the …
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Tuesday 30th October 2012 19:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
I think the Canary Islands maths has been discredited
I'm sure I read a few years after that "news", that actually the Canaries aren't unstable and actually any tidal wave wouldn't be anything like that big - as common sense might suggest, when you think how the wave would spread across thousands of miles of ocean...
...here, for example:
http://www.lapalma-tsunami.com/tudelft.html
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Tuesday 30th October 2012 19:53 GMT IT Hack
Re: I think the Canary Islands maths has been discredited
Indeed...I remember the programme..."Superwaves" on the beeb - broadcast back in the early 2000's I think.
Some of the prog was pretty spot on...that rogue waves are a reality and far more common than originally thought. Then in a fit of Discovery Channel inspired sensationalism they went slightly OOT about the Canaries and the "Superwave"...1000 metres high travelling at 600Km per hour...utter bollocks.
I really hate Discovery Channel.
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Wednesday 31st October 2012 09:47 GMT James Micallef
Lucern and Geneva??
I suspect you mean Lausanne and Geneva? Certainly the narrowing of the lake approaching Geneva would encourage a build-up of water, but I would think that the crescent shape would mean that the wave would be pushing towards the northern shore, playing pretty havoc with swathes of excellent wine-producing vinyards and numerous mega-villas belonging to ultra-loaded tax-avoiding ex-pats, and would thus hit Geneva less strobgly than it would hit Lausanne
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Wednesday 31st October 2012 05:10 GMT Martin Budden
warning system
It takes 70 minutes for the wave to travel from the collapsing delta to Geneva, so a warning system should be feasible: water level sensors should have provided clear evidence of a wave within 10 minutes, giving the Genevois a clear hour to GTFO.
Coat icon because I'm practising my evacuation plan.
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Wednesday 31st October 2012 09:57 GMT James Micallef
Re: warning system
True, the traffic is quite bad considering the short distances, but since Geneva is really tiny, even in rush hour conditions an hour is usually more than enough to get from the lakeside tohigher ground. Anyway most of the congestion is caused by constriction at the bridges, so if everyone is just making for high ground on their own side of teh river, it would help a lot.
The Swiss are a pretty organised bunch, if anyone can pull off a drill to evacuate a small city in an hour, it's them... and I half-expect to receive a detailed evacuation plan in my mailbox within a few months!!
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Wednesday 31st October 2012 12:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: warning system
I know that Zürich already has a warning system against a tsunami resulting from a breakage of the Sihlsee dam, which would result in a wave which would leave the central part of the city under 8m of water. I worked in Flurstr. for a while in the 4th underground cellar of one of the banks there and education on the evacuation procedures was a requirement.
Our kit wasn't very waterproof (even the watercooled stuff). The gold in the cellars under ours probably wouldn't be harmed too much. It had its own railway spur line and strengthened lifts available in case of an evacuation. Incidentally, in one cellar there was an unpopulated miltary barracks, presumably there ready to protect the gold in case the Lichtensteiner army invaded us.
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Wednesday 31st October 2012 14:09 GMT Robert Carnegie
Re: News just in from 563 AD
It's basically a wave, how fast do you expect it to be moving?
Granted it's fairly unlikely to happen this month, can anything be done? Dig up the silt and put it somewhere else, maybe use it to buttress the Canary Islands if we're not going to dismantle those. Bearing in mind that it isn't just what's above the ocean surface - that is just the tip of a whopping huge volcano standing on the sea bed, far far below, and it's when you have a landslide of the whole lot all the way down that the eastern coast of America gets flooded - oh, and when there's a really big storm like this week's Hurricane Sandy, of course.
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Friday 2nd November 2012 02:05 GMT Martin Budden
Re: News just in from 563 AD
I got the 1 hour notice figure from the Australian ABC article which quotes the researchers as saying "Our numerical simulations with a shallow water model show that delta collapse in the lake generates a large tsunami at various locations along the shore, where a wave of 13 metres is observed after only 15 minutes, and at Geneva where a wave of eight metres arrives 70 minutes after the mass movement is initiated".
I allowed 10 minutes for sensors to detect and identify the moving wave and start the alert system, leaving 60 minutes for evacuation.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/10/29/3620543.htm
p.s. I didn't look at the Nature article myself because it's behind a paywall.
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