Posted on 02/05/2008 1:45:51 PM PST by blam
Tsunami threat hangs over southern Italy
05 February 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Southern Italy's active volcanoes mean that living in the region is not for the risk-averse. Less well known, though, is the threat from the sea.
Tsunamis occur around once a century in the Mediterranean Sea. In 1908, a magnitude 7 earthquake created a tsunami that almost destroyed the Italian cities of Messina and Reggio Calabria.
Stefano Lorito of the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology in Rome and his team used historical data to estimate earthquake risk for three different fault zones in the Mediterranean region, and simulated the tsunami that would result from such a quake. (Journal of Geophysical Research, DOI: 10.1029/2007JB004943).
They found that a major rumble in the quake-prone region off the coast of Greece would trigger a tsunami 5 metres high, which would strike the south-east coasts of Sicily and mainland Italy within an hour. Meanwhile, waves as high as 1.5 metres could be triggered by earthquakes off north Africa and in the Tyrrhenian Sea, north of Sicily.
Other countries could also be vulnerable. "A comparable or even greater threat exists for the coasts of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Greece," says Lorito.
From issue 2641 of New Scientist magazine, 05 February 2008, page 15
(Excerpt) Read more at environment.newscientist.com ...
Ping.
Ping!
Must have been heck on the ancients. 15 feet of water across the coastal cities would change the social and political character of the region -- I wonder how many nascent civilizations were wiped out before they had a chance to grow and expand.
Uh oh, that’s family territory.
I grew up near there. AF brat at San Vito Air Station.
run for the hills! the sky is falling!
South Italy is in a bad spot. They have volcanoes, tsunamis, and Turks. Anything could happen.
Sucks to be there, though.
The people running for the hills to avoid the sky falling and the tsunami, are met half way by the people running from the hills because the volcano is exploding...
The Canary Island flank collapse scenario threatening the East Coast of the US has been thoroughly debunked by the wider community of tsunami scientists; collapse tsunamis have difficulty propagating long distances.
Much of the original science in that was flawed. Of course, the media never bothered to tell you about the many scientists that debunked the original highly publicized theory.
By any conceivable measure the tsunami threat to Southern Italy and Sicily is orders of magnitude greater than that to the east coast of the US.
And a garbage strike that has achieved crisis level!
Nah.
Yieks! My family and I are stationed in Sicily. This does not sound good.
Then there's Constantines Meteor.
About the size of a football field: The impact crater left behind
http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~ward/papers/La_Palma_grl.pdf
Like Global Warming, there are experts on both sides.
There. Fixed it.
So the giant scour marks in Australia that all point right at Hawaii were made by . . .
In 1908, a magnitude 7 earthquake created a tsunami that almost destroyed the Italian cities of Messina and Reggio Calabria.Messina, Bell, Messina! is the heart of it. lf they'd followed my plan, I'd be there by now. I'd cut off the retreat of every [deleted] German on this island. [/patton flashback]
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