WHEN half a Spanish island collapses, tsunamis will devastate the coastline
of countries all around the Atlantic. And all because tsunamis can turn
corners.
Last year, Simon Day of University College London and his colleagues reported
that a flank of a volcano on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands was
unstable
(Â鶹´«Ã½, 7th October 2000, p 26).
If the flank collapses, which Day expects to happen sometime in the next few
thousand years, the resulting landslide will dump a trillion tonnes of rock into
the Atlantic within minutes. Day predicted that this would probably send…
