Another global disaster is already in progress. Events are inexorably priming a tsunami that will kill a million people and devastate the south coast of Britain and the eastern seaboard of the United States. “It’s happening now and nothing can stop it,” says the London academic Professor Bill McGuire.
The 50-year-old scientist, who has done more than anyone to publicise the threat of giant tidal waves, hopes the Indian Ocean tragedy will shake governments out of their torpor to prepare for the next catastrophe. “Everybody wants to develop a tsunami warning system now,” he observes drily. “It would have been nice to have had one 10 years ago.”
The Boxing Day tsunami was the first global geophysical event, or “gee gee”, in living memory. It seems mild compared to the horrific scenario identified by McGuire and his team at the Benfield Hazard Research Centre at University College London.
The trigger is a volcano on La Palma in the Canary Islands. Cumbre Vieja normally erupts at intervals of 20 to 200 years and has not done so since 1971. The next eruption may dislodge an unstable 12-mile-long slab of rock the size of the Isle of Man, which will crash to the sea bed causing a dome of water a mile high. The rock is already slipping down by infinitesimal degrees. “When it goes, it will likely collapse in 90 seconds,” McGuire says.
The resulting tsunami, travelling at 500mph, would reach Britain in six hours, with waves rearing up to 33ft. “It’s the same sort of size as the waves that caused the deaths in the Indian Ocean,” McGuire notes.
Britain last received such a battering 7,000 years ago, when a huge landslide off the coast of Norway launched a 75ft wave that poured across northeast Scotland, where Aberdeen is today. “It was the biggest landslide we know of,” says McGuire.
The La Palma tsunami would reach the Americas nine to 12 hours after the dislodgement, laying waste to the eastern seaboard of the United States with waves of 165ft. Boston, New York and Miami would be destroyed and the Caribbean islands overwhelmed.
To avert disaster would require an early warning system in order to stage the largest evacuation in human history. Yet, bizarrely, La Palma has not been closely monitored since McGuire and his colleagues established four years ago that the rock slab was moving at a speed of a third of an inch a year.
The international attention generated by McGuire’s research has astonished him, and there is even a thriller based on his prediction.
Scimitar SL2, the latest book by the bestselling author Patrick Robinson, describes a terrorist plot to attack the United States by detonating La Palma’s rock slide with missile strikes.
But the US government has not acknowledged the hazard or offered funding to research it. “It’s a very blinkered outlook,” McGuire says. “I’ve had loads of e-mails from worried Americans, asking if I know when it’s going to go.” The answer is that he does not know. But the outcome remains 100% certain.
The hazards research centre was set up in 1997 at the behest of the insurance industry — its sponsor, Benfield, is the world’s third-largest reinsurance broker — to predict volcanic eruptions, tropical storms and earthquakes, as well as helping with disaster management. Its collection of vulcanologists, meteorologists and geologists comprises the largest team of its kind in Europe.
McGuire, a Scottish-Welsh volcanologist and author of A Guide to the End of the World: Everything You Never Wanted to Know, identifies another terrifying prospect waiting in the wings. Tokyo is due a repeat of the worst natural disaster in Japan’s history, in which an earthquake measuring 8.3 on the Richter scale killed 143,000 people in 1923. Tokyo and Yokohama were wracked by firestorms.
“The effect on the global economy will be devastating,” McGuire says. He estimates the cost conservatively at between £1.8 trillion and £2.3 trillion. “There will be a global crash worse than 1929.”
On the face of it, Britain is relatively safe from natural catastrophes. We are not in an earthquake zone and the last volcanic activity was in Scotland 40m years ago. But, McGuire points out: “People on the east coast of Sri Lanka felt safe for the same reasons on Christmas Day.”
Yet the British Isles are particularly vulnerable to a side effect of global warming, which McGuire rates the worst of all the “gee gees” because it is already happening and cannot be reversed for thousands of years. He believes there is a serious risk that a disruption of ocean currents, resulting from large-scale melting of Arctic ice, will “shut off” the warm water of the Gulf Stream.
“Without the Gulf Stream, temperatures in the UK and northwestern Europe would be 5C or cooler, with bitter winters as fierce as those of the so-called Little Ice Age in the 17th to 19th centuries.” The process may be already under way, he suspects.
So we will either freeze or roast. “It’s too late to stop temperatures and sea levels rising for thousands of years,” he says. “But if we don’t do anything it’s going to be much worse for our children and grandchildren. Drastic things have to be done now.” By which he means alternative energy sources, with more emphasis on wave and tidal power, and a tax on aviation fuel, one of the largest contributors to global warming.
McGuire is resigned to being called a doom-monger and makes no apology for raising another bleak spectre: a volcanic winter.
The eruption of Toba in Indonesia (not far from the epicentre of last weekend’s earthquake) 73,500 years ago threw up a pall of dust that plunged the world into a six-year winter. “Round about that time, there was a population crash that may have reduced the number of humans to a few thousand. As a race we may have been very close to extinction.”
The geological record suggests that such cataclysmic eruptions occur twice in every 100,000 years. So, bearing Toba in mind, we may be living on borrowed time. But guessing which volcano poses the greatest threat is difficult: of 3,000 active volcanos, only 150 are being monitored. Paradoxically, the greatest peril comes from volcanoes that have been dormant for a long time, McGuire says. The longer they have been quiet, the more violent the next eruption and hence the more difficult to predict.
He should know. In 1996 he was working as senior volcanist adviser on the island of Montserrat when its volcano suddenly erupted. “Magma had been oozing out of it for a year. When the first big explosive eruption took place at midnight, I thought, ‘I’ve had it’. I was about 6km away. Three of us had to go towards the volcano to check it out. If it had been a bigger event, we would have all been killed.” The eruption killed 19 people and destroyed the capital.
He fears that the next cataclysmic eruption will come from an unknown volcano in the southern Andes. “If you chose any of the well-known volcanoes you’re almost certainly going to be wrong. It’s going to be one of the 3,000 that even I haven’t heard of.”
He makes one confident prediction: the volcano of Teide in Tenerife will erupt in the second half of this year, but not disastrously.
The rest of his forecast for 2005 is bleak: a combination of climate change and more people living in coastal areas is a recipe for misfortune. “We’re going to see more deaths and disasters.”
McGuire remains optimistic, however. His next book is entitled Surviving Armageddon: Solutions for a Threatened Planet. “I don’t lose sleep,” he says. “Like everyone else, I don’t think any of these things is going to happen during my lifetime. Then you realise they do happen.”
HISTORIC KILLERS
EARTHQUAKES
240,000 Tang-shan, China, 1976
200,000 Nan-shan, China, 1927
180,000 Kansu, China, 1920
160,000 Messina, Italy, 1908
140,000 Tokyo, Japan, 1923
20TH-CENTURY TSUNAMIS
12,000 Agadir, Morocco, 1960
8,000 Papua New Guinea, 1998
5,000 Philippines, 1976
5,000 Chile, 1960
3,000 Japan/Hawaii, 1933
1,088 Japan, 1946
EPIDEMICS
21m Aids worldwide 1981-onwards
21m Influenza worldwide, 1918-20
12m Bubonic plague, India, 1896-1948
3m Typhus, eastern Europe, 1914-15
