Why dont the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists just hit this island?

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Vesayen
The destruction isnt caused by the eruption, its caused by an unstable part of the island collapsing into the sea-an eruption could just be one of several catalystzs.

At the extreme case you could use a nuke to do it, more practically use alot of deep insertion charges.

It looks like the U.N. has no choice but to pay you your....
one million dollars. Buhwahahaha......

[Az]

IIRC you're wrong on that Dr. Strangelove.

a 20 Megaton termonuke can take out a mountain, and make it into dust. Which is similar to what such a volcano, ala Krakatoa or that greek island would do.

[Theben]

Originally posted by Azazel


IIRC you're wrong on that Dr. Strangelove.

a 20 Megaton termonuke can take out a mountain, and make it into dust. Which is similar to what such a volcano, ala Krakatoa or that greek island would do.

1st of all, no terrorist is gonna get a 20mton nuke; a best they'll get some small 'dirty' bombs;

2nd, volcanos can erupt with hundreds of megatons of force. IIRC the most powerful nukes are around 100mtons.

[Az]

1st of all, no terrorist is gonna get a 20mton nuke; a best they'll get some small 'dirty' bombs;

I was talking about Krakatoa being more than humanity's nuke arsenal.

2nd, volcanos can erupt with hundreds of megatons of force. IIRC the most powerful nukes are around 100mtons.

I've heard that the operational nukes, the biggest one is 20megaton.

however there are thousands of them!

[The Mad Monk]

In truth, natural disasters have frequently produced smoke and dust far greater than those expected from a nuclear war. In 1883 Krakatoa exploded with a blast equivalent to 10,000 one-megaton bombs, a detonation greater than the combined nuclear arsenals of planet earth. The Krakatoa explosion had negligible weather effects. Even more disastrous, going back many thousands of years, a meteor struck Quebec with the force of 17.5 million one-megaton bombs, creating a crater 63 kilometers in diameter. But the world did not freeze. Life on earth was not extinguished.

http://www.antipas.org/news/world/nuclear_war.html

[Straybow]

Originally posted by reds4ever
Read the date on the link title, it was dismissed as bollocks many moons ago (the exact subject was on a BBC docu and got ripped to shreds)

Hardly "ripped to shreds," reds. These events are orders of magnitude more likely than killer asteroids, which receive a significant amount of attention. The debate is over the means, which is speculative.

The pages shown in google for the Discovery Channel and Discovery Channel Europe have been removed without explanation. That smacks of a political or public relations decision rather than scientific argument, etc.

The same program discussed supervolcanoes, specifically one located at Yellowstone. The caldera is the entire valley, 25×40 miles. In this case the event has occurred three times in the past at intervals of 600k-800k yrs USGS Supervocano FAQ. Discovery Channel pages (eg, Supervocanoes) are still there.

A page set up to debunk the Discovery Channel segment, by Dr. George Pararas-Carayannis of The Tsunami Society, Mega Tsunami Hazards, contains such howlers as:

…The Discovery program does not bring out in the interviews that such volcanic collapses are extremely rare events, separated in geologic time by thousands or even millions of years.

No such event - a mega tsunami - has occurred in either the Atlantic or Pacific oceans in recorded history. NONE.

The colossal collapses of Krakatau or Santorin (the two most similar known happenings) generated catastrophic waves in the immediate area but hazardous waves did not propagate to distant shores…

The scientists on the Discovery Channel program (names not available due to the missing web pages) did, in fact, say that it could be centuries before a catastrophic collapse of Cumbre Vieja occurs, and even then it might not be a collapse of the whole face.

Note the phrase "in recorded history." No globally significant disasters have occurred in recorded history. The few millennia of recorded history is an idiotically short period of time when considering regional or global geological disasters.

The model for the mega tsunami is the Lituya Bay tsunami of 1958 (see Lituya.pdf). There are no other historic examples of a tsunami generated by sub-aerial landslide of this sort. The key factors are that the landslide strikes at an angle that causes direction displacement, and it displaces its own volume plus a large volume of air behind it due to gravity, inertia, and surface tension effects (see the scaled images in the pdf if you missed the TV show).

While huge volumes of rock and debris fell into the oceans due to Krakatoa (see PC.pdf) and Santorini there was no evidence of one or more landslide(s) of significant volume having the slope and velocity characteristics of the Lituya event. The focus of the Discovery segment was the effect of the face of Cumbre Vieja collapsing all at once.

Dr. Pararas-Carayannis claims "Carefully performed numerical and experimental model experiments on such events and of the postulated Las Palma event verify that the relatively short waves from these small, though intense, occurrences do not travel as do tsunami waves from a major earthquake." His links do not present any of these experiments or models, especially the effect of a Lituya-like slide into deeper waters at the base of Cumbre Vieja.

[uh Clem]

That means we're more likely to see a slow and steady discharge during an eruption then a big explosive eruption like most subduction powered volcanos have.

Oerdin, you guys sit around all day and talk about filth like this? Sheeesh.....

[Solly]

Slow and steady discharge

Massive eruption I'll have that.

[Straybow]

Originally posted by Oerdin
Any way, the Canary Islands are hot spot volcanos much like the Hawaiian Islands. That means they produce a lava which is hotter and generally has a lower silica content (we call this a mafic lava). That means we're more likely to see a slow and steady discharge during an eruption then a big explosive eruption like most subduction powered volcanos have.

Thank you for adding some actual scientific input amid the usual inanities. Cumbre Vieja doesn't appear to be a shield volcano, by the footage in the TV show and other pictures.

I take it you did not see the show? The model for the collapse of Cumbre Vieja was not a magmatic explosion, rather a collapse of volcanic dikes that stabilize the cone.

The eruption itself superheats water trapped by the dikes. If the temperature is high enough the superheated water explodes into steam. Steam pressure ruptures the dikes and destabilizes the slopes. Without that structural support the face could collapse suddenly. The volume of that material is easily a hundred times larger than the Lituya case (0.03 km³).

In the show, the volcanologist was studying signs of magma buildup and heating of the subterranean water. He was tracking a progression of steam vents along the northern ridge of Cumbre Nueva, showing that the heating was not confined to the primary lava tube. From that he concluded the whole face was vulnerable to collapse, and not just the peak of Cumbre Vieja itself.

[Dis]

terrorists are dumb