Originally published at: Watch 40-foot wave of lava destroy everything in its path in Spain's La Palma Island | Boing Boing
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I don’t mean to alarm anyone but I recall seeing a TV show about a lump of the Canary islands falling into the ocean and causing a tsunami…
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The Fire God is angry, again.
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I was told there would be instant vaporization, and I can’t say I left appointed.
also it’s neat how at a glance it just looks like a bunch of mud or soil sittin there.
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Well, there goes the neighborhood.
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It it just me, or has twitter become massively inconvenient for those without accounts?
The video usually is sub par compared to youtube.
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FTFY.
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I wonder what the long-term implications are for landowners when the landscape itself is so radically changed. Does the government just offer some kind of compensation to take over the land? Do you hire a surveyor to figure out where your property lines used to be? If you owned some coastal property on the edge of the island, do you get to claim all the new land created by the lava overflow?
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Yeah, I was just wondering that. I was assuming that the land is a loss, even for those whose properties ended up as islands that avoided destruction, as the infrastructure’s gone and likely not coming back. But apparently, in Hawaii, people sometime do buy plots that were covered with lava, and live there. I suspect it’s not too common, though:
Also:
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Live in an interesting place — get interesting prizes.
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Now this reminded me of “The Blob”
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This is a pretty active volcano which also went off in 1949 and 1971, so nobody can clam to be surprised by this, but even with this dramatic footage the overall risk of living on that island isn’t that crazy high. From what I’ve read less than 10% of the island’s residents have had to evacuate their homes so far, with 320 buildings lost as of today with no reported injuries. I’m sure there are a lot of neighborhoods where hurricanes have done a similar level of destruction over the same timescale.
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I can’t see a wall register cover without thinking of The Blob.
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“a waterfall of lava”
Best line in the article.
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The volcanic islands are part of the North African tectonic plate, which is sliding under the Eurasian plate.
That’s nothing to do with the volcanism on the Canaries which are driven by a Mantle Plume rather than by plate tectonics.
The African Plate is colliding with Eurasian Plate along the line of the Mediterranean rather than subduction which is why the Alpine ranges exist. The small amount of subduction in the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean associated with arc volcanism is due to a residual section of the Tethys Ocean rather than the continental crust of Africa.
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Maybe it’s ‘here comes the bigger neighborhood’ except there’s no soil, just rock to carve away.
Not gonna lie, I understood almost none of that. But the plate tectonics seemed way off (as you say) given where the Canaries are and where the Alps are.
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La Palma, like the other Canary Islands, is a very beautiful place. Each island is different, going from arid in the east to green in the west, and in each island the northern part being greener than the southern. It is beautiful to see nature in action, but it is also painful to see houses, schools, memories, and livelihoods disappear under the lava flow. The most advanced finger of the lava is now perilously close to the church of Todoque and the locals are trying to do everything that they can to try to save it.
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