[...]... considered—in what I hope was a reasonably informed and balanced manner— those global catastrophes that threaten our world and our N 1 foreword race: asteroid and comet impacts, volcanic super-eruptions, giant earthquakes, and mega-tsunami, the prospects for a new ice age and the coming hothouse Earth As has always been the case for those who accept futurology’s poisoned chalice of prediction, reaction to... provide such a link When the Cumbre Vieja’s west flank finally crashes into the ocean, the aforementioned Ward and Day tsunami model predicts that the resulting waves will have a terrible impact in the Caribbean, so this seems like a good place to search for the effects of past collapses With the land rising majestically to a full 63 m above sea level, the thousands of islands that make up the Bahamas would... interest was attracted by another volcano— the Cumbre Vieja—on the western Canary island of La Palma This, it seemed, had erupted on a small scale in 1971, but far more interesting shenanigans had apparently been going on during a more violent eruption a quarter of a century earlier Juan Carlos, who had an illustrated poster showing the geology of the volcano, pointed to a series of long fractures that had... recently activated giant landslide, collaboration swiftly ensued, and that autumn, 12 the heebie gee-gees with the help of financial support from the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), I led a team of colleagues and research students south to La Palma Our objective was to establish a socalled ground deformation network: an array of survey benchmarks (actually just specially designed nails banged into stable... abstracted from the realm of science fantasy In a way, these revelations touting catastrophe on a hitherto unprecedented scale have also helped people to appreciate that our planet really is vulnerable—not only to the forces of nature but also to the activities of man But to return to the La Palma saga, which continues to rumble on A year after the Horizon broadcast, Simon Day of UCL and Steve Ward, of the University... rapidly, that the enormous pressures generated at the slide’s base actually melted the rock Eventually, with no water to facilitate continued movement, everything was brought to a halt before yet more of the island disappeared beneath the waves The aborted San Andres collapse has great significance as it shows that Canary Islands landslides move rapidly and as coherent blocks, supporting the idea that their... water conditions than those that prevail today around the Canary Islands, so emplacement may well have occurred during the last Ice Age, when sea levels were even lower So far, it has not been possible to link the stranded tsunami deposits on Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura to any particular collapse event in the archipelago, but on the other side of the Atlantic Basin further enigmatic features may... potential global catastrophes far enough in advance, either to prevent them happening at all or, at the very least, to allow us some breathing space to prepare for the inevitable and maximize the chances of the fabric of our society surviving relatively unscathed Crucially, a scientific and technological approach cannot be successful in isolation, but must be accompanied by other measures In the case of... encountered on or around many of the world’s volcanic island chains, including the Hawaiian Islands, which are encircled by a vast apron of debris accumulated as a result of close to 70 distinct collapse events, each of which may have sent giant tsunami surging across the Pacific Basin Vast embayments on the flanks, or landslide debris scattered across the adjacent sea floor, testify to many other landslides... Taburiente volcano, which forms the northern part of the island, slid beneath the 20 the heebie gee-gees waves around half a million years ago, leaving a gigantic amphitheatre 14 km across enclosed by towering cliffs up to 2 km high The Canary Islands have also hosted other enormous landslides, at least a dozen in all over the last several million years, and some of the islands have actually been shaped by . any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–280571–1 13579108642 Typeset by RefineCatch.