More Future Disasters

The editors of Popular Science this month chose to commemorate the first anniversary of Katrina by listing the top 5 disasters that the U.S. can expect in the future. (I guess great minds think alike.) In my earlier article, I missed one completely and it is this:

Glacial melting in Greenland causes a freshwater cap in the North Atlantic. This stalls the circulation of warm water from the South and shifts the climate. All of civilization bordering the North Atlantic would be severely affected. The Eastern half of the U.S. and Canada along with all of Europe would experience a little ice age. Such a shift happened in the period 1550 to 1850. The worst part of this disaster is that if it only lasts 300 years like the last time we'll be lucky.

Also, I mentioned the possiblity of a big Tsunami hitting the U.S., but not mentioning La Palma was my bad. The following two paragraphs are straight from Wikipedia.

"La Palma is not only the steepest island in the world but has also been the most volcanically active of the Canary Isles in the past 500 years. The last few eruptions in the ridge were in 1470, 1585, 1646, 1677, 1712, 1949, and 1971. During the 1949 eruption, a two kilometer-long fracture opened and parts of the western half of the Cumbre Vieja ridge slipped several meters downwards towards the Atlantic Ocean. The fracture can quite easily be seen to this day. It is believed that this process was driven by the pressure caused by the rising magma heating and vaporizing water trapped within the structure of the island.

Scientists warn that in some future eruption within the next few thousand years the western half of the island, approximately 500km3 of land weighing an estimated 500 billion tons, will slide into the ocean -- a so called "lateral collapse". Should that happen, the resulting megatsunami would reach local heights of well over 300 meters and the speed of a jetliner, reaching the African coast in three hours, the coast of England in five, and the eastern seaboard of North America in eight. This could greatly damage if not completely destroy cities along the United States' east coast, such as New York, Boston, Washington, DC, Norfolk, Virginia, and Miami with 25 to 30m high waves."

Now how cool is that?

Finally, I also failed to adequately cover the potential devastation from a hurricane hitting the city of Miami directly. This oversite was natural given that I am a life-long OU football fan and I have an aversion to anything involving Miami Hurricanes.