Geological Time Bomb: Red Alert Issued For El Hierro Volcanic Region in Canary Islands; Possible Tsunami Threat To U.S. East Coast

Geological Time Bomb: Red Alert Issued For El Hierro Volcanic Region in Canary Islands; Possible Tsunami Threat To U.S. East Coast

The IGN, Spain’s USGS equivalent, has issued a Red Alert warning for the El Hierro volcanic region in the Canary Islands amid thousands of earthquake swarms and volcanic activity which started in early August:

SPAIN’S Instituto Geográfico Nacional (IGN) confirmed on Tuesday that an underwater eruption has occurred five kilometres off the southern coastline of El Hierro, the smallest of the Canary Islands.

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A Red Alert has since been issued by local authorities for the town.

A notice posted on the Emergencia El Hierro website on Tuesday evening stated: “Phase pre-eruptive. It involves the initiation of a preventive evacuation. Make yourself available to the authorities.”

Source: The Olive Press (Spain)

For those not familiar with the volcano, it is situated off the northwest coast of Africa in the Canary Islands, an autonomous Spanish archipelago. While there is no danger to the United States from volcanic eruptions, it has been long theorized by researchers that a large enough eruption and earthquake may be capable of splitting a neighboring volcano, La Palma, in two, which would subsequently cause a land slide on a scale unprecedented in recorded human history. The result would be a massive Mega-Tsunami that would cross the Atlantic ocean, slamming into the Eastern cost of the United States, the Caribbean islands and parts of South America.

While Tsunamis on this scale are incredibly rare according to researchers, a landslide in 1958 in Latuya Bay, Alaska caused a Mega Tsunami (video) whose wave was higher than the Empire State Building and washed over trees and land some 1,700 feet high above sea level.

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