A ‘mega-tsunami’ could be heading our way soon and could be of such biblicial proportions that we’d all face extinction. A 1,000ft wave swept across the Earth 73,000 years ago. A volcano on the Cape Verde Islands off West Africa set that particular tsunami going and many scientists say we’re due another one.
This ancient effort saw more than 40 cubic miles (167 cubic meters) of rock smash into the ocean, resulting in an 800ft (244m) high wave that swallowed up an island more than thirty miles away. It was devastating.
Doctor Ricardo Ramalho, a leading scientist who studies these kinds of things, from Columbia University in New York says this:
“Our point is that flank collapses can happen extremely fast and catastrophically, and therefore are capable of triggering giant tsunamis.”
“They probably don’t happen very often. But we need to take this into account when we think about the hazard potential of these kinds of volcanic features.”
So how big is a 1,000ft tsunami? Well, by comparison, of all the largest known recent tsunamis, we’ve got the one that devastated eastern Japan in 2011, that achieved a maximum height of around 100ft (30m).
So ten times bigger than that, then…
