It is plausible…even probable
Dania Beach, the community where I live sits along the Eastern Seaboard like so many beachfront communities. Should a tsunami happen there would be untold deaths and property losses in gargantuan proportions.
The pier at Dania Beach about to be swallowed by giant wave
There are presently scientists who have been observing a chunk of a mountain in the Canary Island that is about to split from the rest of the island and crash into the sea. If such a thing was to happen; the experts predict that the amount of water displaced would be enough to create a tsunami more than 100 feet high.
I don’t know about you but my house sits only 15 feet above sea level and approximately one mile from the Atlantic Ocean. Watching the Japan tsunami and seeing how the massive wall of water just wiped out entire cities I wonder about our own safety. In Japan they had some warning and a little time to evacuate to higher grounds; to no avail because the casualties are still believed to be in the thousands.
The wave would hit the beach at its highest level, wipe out everything in its path, spill on to the Intracoastal and then through a half a mile of mangroves which might slow it down some but it would still be large enough to consume and lay to ruins my community. If my house survives and it might because it is solid concrete walls…I might end up with waterfront property.
South Florida is flat…more precisely; it is a swamp that has been drained. In fact, most of the land west of us is sea level at best. A series of canals that pump out water make it possible to conduct agriculture and to have communities there. We along the shore are actually at a higher elevation. Where would we go if a tsunami is approaching? There is no higher ground and the best thing we could do is bend over and kiss our asses goodbye.
It only puts into perspective the frailty of the human condition; living in a planet that is not benign and regales us with plenty of natural disasters. And please, don’t come back to me with the religious crap that the world is coming to an end and catastrophes are occurring more often…They are not, not any more frequently than they have through recorded history.
Scientists Warn Of Massive Tidal Wave From Canary Island Volcano
By Steve Connor
Science Editor
The Independent - London
8-29-1
| A wave higher than Nelson's Column and travelling faster than a jet aircraft will devastate the eastern seaboard of America and inundate much of southern Britain, say scientists who have analyzed the effects of a future volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands.
A massive slab of rock twice the volume of the Isle of Man would break away from the island of La Palma and smash into the Atlantic Ocean to cause a tsunami - a monster wave - bigger than any recorded, the scientists warned yesterday.
Most of the wave's energy, equivalent to the combined output of America's power stations for six months, would travel westwards to the American coast but enough would be flicked north towards the English Channel to cause catastrophic coastal damage.
A computer model has been designed to show the way the tsunami will build after the volcano, called Cumbre Vieja, erupts on La Palma, at the western end of the Spanish island chain. It describes the almost unimaginable scale of an event that the scientists say could happen at any time within the foreseeable future.
"We're looking at an event that could be decades or a century away - but there will be a degree of warning beforehand," said Simon Day, of the Benfield Greg Hazard Research Centre at University College London.
Most of the rocky western flank of Cumbre Vieja is unstable enough to be dislodged in the next big eruption of the volcano, which is active enough to explode at least once or twice a century. Its last big event was in 1949. 
Such a landslide from a future eruption could travel up to 60 kilometers (37 miles) from La Palma's coast, causing the formation and then collapse of a dome of water 900 meters (3,000ft) high and tens of kilometers wide. The bow of this collapsing dome of water would become a giant wave, but also, as the landslide continued to move underwater, a series of crests and troughs would soon generate the "wave train" of the tsunami.
With the leading wave in front and crests pushing it on behind, it would sustain the power for the nine-hour journey to the American east coast.
Tsunami means harbor wave in Japanese and, though the occurrence has nothing to do with the tides, it is often called a tidal wave in English. Throughout history they have caused widespread devastation, with Britain last being affected by one in 1755 when an earthquake in Lisbon caused an unusually large wave to hit southern ports.
The computer model, compiled in collaboration with Steven Ward of the University of California, Santa Cruz, predicts that the tsunami will have a height of 100 meters (330ft) from crest to trough when it crashes into the shores of nearby north-west Africa. By the time it reached its final destination, the east coast of Florida and the Caribbean islands, the tsunami would still be up to 50 meters high.
Low-lying land in Florida would be vulnerable to a sea wave that would inundate the mainland for several kilometers inland. Everything in its path would be flattened, the computer model predicted.
Even though the wave would be much smaller when it reached Britain, it would still breach sea defenses because it would be larger than the biggest storm waves for which they were designed, Dr Day said. "For low-lying land along the south coast it could penetrate up to a mile," he said.
Although there is little doubt that the landslide on La Palma will happen after a volcanic eruption, the difficulty is knowing exactly when it will occur. "Eruptions of Cumbre Vieja occur at intervals of decades to a century or so and there may be a number of eruptions before its collapse," Dr Day said. "Although the year-to-year probability of a collapse is therefore low, the resulting tsunami would be a major disaster with indirect effects around the world."
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Just a humble observation: I we know that it is going to happen…not if but when; why couldn’t the scenario be altered somewhat? Could we not apply dynamite at strategic places and blow up some of the mountainside before it falls to the sea and also create a cushion for when the other portion slides off during a volcanic eruption? Sounds like something logical to me.
Wouldn't it be better to spend a few million dollars now blowing up the fucking mountainside and avoid the crisis than to have the mountain fall in the ocean later and cause billions of dollars in damage and millions of deaths?SOURCE: http://www.rense.com/general13/tidal.htm
