East Coast USA Has Tsunami Threats
Submitted by Robert Bast on November 30, 2012 – 11:09 pmNo Comment
The biggest tsunami threats to the USA are on the West Coast. But that doesn’t mean the East Coast is immune. And to make things worse, because they aren’t expecting a tsunami, they won’t be prepared when one arrives.
To be fair, most of the threats are negligible:
- Puerto Rico Trench – it is a subduction zone, but it is the Caribbean that is at risk, not the USA
- Azores-Gibraltar Transform Fault, off the coast of Portugal – it destroyed Lisbon in 1755, but the USA wasn’t affected
- Cumbre Vieja (Canary Islands) – a 2001 study suggested this series of events could send a 70-foot (21 m) wave crashing into the East Coast, but other studies since have decided it would only reach a height of a couple of feet
The biggest risk is from a submarine landslide near the U.S. coast. The resultant tsunami would dissipate quite quickly, so the landslide would need to be near a populated area. Experts are still in the process of mapping where these risks lie.
Completely missing from the Mother Nature Network article is the risk from asteroids and comets. While they don’t happen as frequently as earthquakes and landslides, the tsunamis they can generate are massively larger and more lethal.
