[js1138]

The Canary Island thing is unlikely, but if it does happen it will take out many East Coast cities. Even with hours of warning I doubt if you could evacuate these cities.

[Arthalion]

The Canary Island thing is unlikely

Actually, no geologist who has ever examined La Palma disagrees with the idea that the flank will collapse into the ocean one day, they just disagree about the speed of the collapse and the size of the wave that it will generate. The flank already slipped about 9 feet in a 1949 eruption.

The debate really comes from evidence presented by the Hawaiian Islands. Seafloor evidence indicates that vast sections of the Hawaiian Islands, including big chunks of Oahu and Maui, and possibly 75% of the original Molokai, fell into the sea in sudden collapses that sent boulders the sizes of skyscrapers rolling nearly 100 miles across the ocean floor. The waves generated by those collapses would have been incomprehensibly large.

On the other hand, the sea floor also shows evidence of slow slumps, where huge areas of the islands have slowly subsided over periods of decades, centuries, or even millenia. The 2000 "Slow Quake", where over 70 square miles of the big island "slipped" about 4 inches over 36 hours is often pointed to as an example of a gradual slumping event.

The disagreement at this point isn't over whether La Palma will collapse, but which model it will follow.