Watch the Birdie

Wave to the Canaries: just hope the Canaries don’t wave back

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

01/25/03

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Humor/canary.htm

This is so cool.

OK, if I wasn’t on the western side of the great divide.

If I wasn’t over 100 miles inland.

If I wasn’t thirty-five hundred feet above sea level.

Then maybe I wouldn’t think it was so cool.

Of course, I live on a volcano. It could blow first. That wouldn’t be cool. Then I would miss out. As the pyroclastic flow engulfed me, stripping the meat from my bones and boiling my brain, my last thought would be, "Nuts. I wanted to see La Palma do its thing."

Here’s the thing. We have this little situation out in the Atlantic that could completely destroy the entire east coast of all of North America, and a good chunk of Central and South America.

Canada would hardly be affected. Ever since the Grand Banks got fished out, all the Maritimes are good for are good locales for Ansel Adams wannabees who think taking black and white pictures of bare granite is the way to fortune and fame, seagulls, and rustic locals who make their money posing for pictures with yuppies who have discovered the still life with granite thing wasn’t working out.

So if the Maritimes get wiped out, Kodak stock drops and federal politicians find the traveling they have to do each year reduced by 20%.

But for the United States, the east coast has a few points of interest, without which certain dislocations might occur. New York City, for instance. Remember all the fuss people made about that Nine Eleven thing? And that was just two buildings. We’re talking about the whole island of Manhattan being swept cleaner than a baby’s bum. (Well, ok, a recently-washed baby’s bum). (On second thought, this IS New York we’re talking about. OK, no need to wash the baby.)

Every coastal town from Bar Harbor to Miami would be eliminated. That would include places such as Boston, Baltimore, and Charleston.

This would make many insurance companies very unhappy. But only the insurance companies that happened to be more than a dozen miles inland from the east coast. The rest would be one with the fishies.

Here’s the thing. The thing is that when you get tired of watching Presidential speeches and turning your throat in to raw hamburger screaming "Ohmigawd, the crazy son of a bitch is SERIOUS!", there’s always the Discovery channel. Idiocy on television has two types: intentional and unintentional. Intentional is good, which is where Cartoon Network and the Comedy Channel and CNN come in. Unintentional idiocy is not good, which is why you should avoid ABC and Faux News.

Discovery is relatively low on unintentional idiocy, and so thus is good to watch during those times when intentional idiocy seems inadequate for meeting the tide of unintentional idiocy.

So here’s the thing. I was watching Discovery because it didn’t have Putsch on it, and Ed, Edd and Eddy wasn’t on the Toon channel, just doing that improving my mind thing, and they had this show called "Mega Tsunami," a name which left me thinking I had stayed on the Toon channel by mistake.

It was about waves. Big waves. Not the puny little 50 foot waves that splash Hawaii. We’re talking about city buster waves here, waves that rear up over a mile high and just wipe out everything for several miles inland.

These are waves that happen because a large chunk of water got suddenly and dramatically displaced, all at once. They happen from time to time. In Alaska, they noticed that the high-tide mark in one inlet seemed to be 450 feet higher than where the water was actually located and were just about to start wondering why that was when a big chunk of glacier at the inland end of the bay broke loose, sending another 450 foot wall of water rushing through the bay.

Oh! Duh!

Java got pretty well stamped flat by a big wave in 1901 when Krakatoa cut loose and an 8,000 foot volcano became one with the stratosphere. Crescent City, California, just two hours’ drive from here, got hammered pretty good by a tsunami back in 1964, caused by, of all things, an earthquake – ok, a BIG earthquake – in Anchorage, Alaska.

Now here’s the thing. The thing is that there’s a smallish group of islands off the northwest coast of Africa known as the Canaries, even though they aren’t particularly yellow. The thing about these islands is that they had a volcanic eruption – the aforementioned La Palma – a few years back, and a geologist who was checking out the pretty bright red rivers of lava was puzzled to see a gap of about four meters width along the crest of the island ridge, running in roughly a north-south direction. After a while, he realized a simple thing.

The thing is the island is breaking in half, and the half that’s breaking off and will, one day, plop into the Atlantic is the side that is facing toward the west – i.e. America.

He mentioned this to some Japanese scientists. Japanese scientists just love shit like this, living where they do with all the quakes and tsunamis and large rubber monsters they get stomping their cities flat, so they built an elaborate bathtub sort of thing and had fun plopping various objects in at various angles and using high-speed cameras to check out what happened at the other end of the tub.

What happened at the other end of the tub was real bad news for Newark. Allowing for scale, they came up with a conservative set of estimates. The wave would start out about 650 meters tall (that’s right – about 2,000 feet tall), and would have a wavelength of about 40-60 miles (most waves are far less than 100 feet) and would be moving along at about two hundred miles an hour. As it hit the shallows, it would bunch up to maybe two miles high, and from there, cause minor inconvenience twelve miles of what had formerly been inland.

To illustrate the point, they showed an island bluff, about 500 feet above sea level. On the bluff were sea-bottom rocks about the size of Bill Gates’ house that a mega-tsunami had left as it receded.

Now, there is a downside to all this. If someone on the Canaries is alert, and notices that half the main island just fell into the ocean, then the US would get about eight hours warning before the wave hit. Which means that they would have time to evacuate VIPs from Washington, DC.

Sure seems like a pure waste of a perfectly good natural disaster, but what can you do?

Now, here’s the thing. If this happens tomorrow, I’m going to be sitting here and feeling like a real shit, because various right wing whacks will be saying I caused it or some such. (It was Clinton’s penis that really caused it, of course.) But it might not happen for years. Centuries, even. Sure, it’s just like having a big old crack appear right down the middle of Hoover Dam with beads of water forming on the lip of the crack, only on a scale ten thousand times bigger, but you know, that’s just one of the things you gotta expect living in New York.

And for those of you who are saying, "Look at the smug bastard, all dry and safe on the side of a volcano, and all he has to worry about besides the volcano are thirty-foot snowstorms," keep in mind that the Pacific Northwest has its own paleobotanical evidence of interesting events. Nine point five earthquakes, for instance. Those are the type that feature 200 foot ground waves moving at close to 1,000 miles an hour. Socially awkward, and known to cause structural damage.

At least for us, it would be quick. Think of the poor people in Kansas and Oklahoma, who are all dying of boredom. Oh, the humanity.

So anyway: you stopped thinking about Putsch for a few minutes. Don’t you feel better now?