Recently, scientists have realised that the next Mega Tsunami is likely to begin on one of the Canary Islands, off the coast of North Africa, where a wall of water will one day race across the entire Atlantic Ocean at the speed of a jet airliner to devastate the east coast of the United States, the Caribbean and Brazil.
Dr Simon Day, who works at the Benfield Greig Hazards Research Centre, University College London*, says that one flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma, in the Canaries, is unstable and could plunge into the ocean during the volcano's next eruption.
Dr. Day says: "If the volcano collapsed in one block of almost 20 cubic kilometres of rock, weighing 500 billion tonnes - twice the size of the Isle of Wight - it would fall into water almost 4 miles deep and create an undersea wave 2000 feet tall. Within five minutes of the landslide, a dome of water about a mile high would form and then collapse, before the Mega Tsunami fanned out in every direction, travelling at speeds of up to 500 mph. A 330ft wave would strike the western Sahara in less than an hour."
Europe would be protected from the fiercest force by the position of the other Canary Islands, but the tsunami would still bring 33ft waves to Lisbon and La Coruņa within three hours.
After six hours it would reach Britain, where waves up to 40 ft high would hit southwest England at 500 miles per hour, travel a mile inland and obliterate almost everything in its path. Even Britain's more sheltered shores, in the North Sea and Irish Sea, will be struck by smaller but still significant swells, causing widespread flooding in major coastal cities.
"We need better models to see what the precise effects on Britain will be." Dr. Day said. However, it is likely that London could suffer sever inundation as the Thames Barrier's ability to cope with such a dramatic rise in water levels exceeds its design specifications.
"The Thames estuary is already subject to major tidal surges," says Dr. Day, "and the Mega Tsunami could raise water levels by as much as 20 feet, with the surge travelling up the river at some 200 miles per hour." Devastation along both banks of the Thames would be huge, with many parts of the City and areas along both the north and south banks of the river as far as Putney Bridge and beyond experiencing severe damage. The effects on the London underground are hard to imagine, but the entire network would become flooded and the consequent loss of life would be immense."
http://www.rense.com/general56/tsu.htm