That threat is La Palma, the largest and most volcanically active of the Canary Islands, more than 6 000 miles away, a section of which is collapsing. In the October 7 edition of New Scientist magazine, Dr. Simon Day, of the Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre at University College, London, said when the mass of 500 billion tonnes of rock from the Cumbre Vieja volcano collapses into the sea, it will trigger a 2 000-foot tsunami (huge wave) which will spread across the Atlantic Ocean, hitting the islands of the Caribbean and the eastern seaboard of the United States. The wave will likely be 130 to 160 feet by the time it reaches land, and at 300 miles per hour, will engulf everything in its path.

When could this happen?

“The Cumbre Vieja isn’t going to collapse spontaneously, but it’s also worrying. After all, the volcano erupts once every few decades,” Day told New Scientist. The last eruption was in 1971. The collapse is expected along a fault line on the volcano’s slope discovered in 1949. In 1995, Day found that it had slipped 13 feet towards the sea, but satellite measurements showed there was no further movement up to late last year.

There are two schools of thought on the mechanics of the slip, but each agrees that a collapse would be caused by an explosion and it all depends on the strength and location of that explosion. In the Caribbean, the man responsible for advising governments on these issues, Dr. John Shepherd, said the landslide seems feasible but the resulting tsunami doesn’t hold water. However, he said it should not be ignored.

“We can never dismiss these things completely,” Shepherd, director of the Seismic Research Unit of the University of the West Indies, told the Weekend Nation. “Tsunamis travel at 500 kilometres per hour (300 miles per hour); so if there were to be a major collapse, we
would have six or seven hours’ notice. It would be big news all over the world six or seven hours before any wave reaches Barbados,” he added.