La Palma is rumbling - What are the implications of a 40 foot Tsunami along the east coast?

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Jimbobaggins said:
There goes a building
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For anyone doing their quick morning scan like I've been doing lately: it spit out a shitton of new lava low on the volcano side (Friday) night, from a much lower location that seems to have given the lava a chance to pour out in a way it wasn't really doing before. Huge new flow right down into town, wherein it seems to have crawled right over a neighborhood in the span of only a few hours.

lava3.jpg
lava2.jpg
This is all well below where the little trickle of lava had been the last few nights, which was sort of up and to the right of all this new shit and isn't really even visible anymore, presumably because any little flow that was feeding it is now pouring into this. Though it initially broke loose in one pretty dramatic rush, it wasn't one-and-done, and has been coming in waves where periodically it'll eject a big new mass of lava to keep feeding down the slope... in other words, it didn't just flow on down and then cool, it's getting a semi-steady feed and seems like it's advancing pretty steadily. Made it all the way down into town pretty quick.

lava1.jpg lava4.jpg lava5.jpg
Images from down in town. Apparently this was enough of a notable event that someone got their ass up to the camera that's been streaming, and instead of just being left in a stationary shot of the volcano it's been zooming and panning around to show the lava hitting town.
 
Now that I think about it. You could easily direct the Lava flow with high pressured pumps soraying water on both sides of the lava flow.
 
154 earthquakes in the last 24 hours (10/9/2021). I’ll just let the screenshots speak for themselves:
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Past 30 days:
142416C2-83FB-4FD4-A25F-1265540AFACB.jpeg
I added the red mark to notate when the eruption started on Sept. 19. Keep in mind, they aren’t even monitoring anything below M2.0 currently.
 
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I keep watching the volcano and it's making me think thinky thoughts.

If all that magma and gasses and what-have-you come out from under the ground, wouldn't that leave the now-empty area unstable? (I think I've blathered about this before) Is the magma directly below the volcano or coming from somewhere nearby? What is pushing it out?

Why is it that if a glacier so much as sweats a drop of water into the ocean the ecologists are screeching about how the oceans are gonna rise, change the weather patterns and kill us all, but volcanoes get a free pass to barf lava off the coasts of islands and no one bats an eye? I mean, I'm no scientist but I know what happens if I try to put an extra ice cube into my glass of Pepsi on a hot day.

Why can't I stop watching this thing? I have other stuff I should be doing.
 
FatalTater said:
I keep watching the volcano and it's making me think thinky thoughts.

If all that magma and gasses and what-have-you come out from under the ground, wouldn't that leave the now-empty area unstable? (I think I've blathered about this before) Is the magma directly below the volcano or coming from somewhere nearby?
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You’re right about this, but it all depends on how much empty space is left over. If the space is thin, you get a lava tube - basically a cave. And if a HUGE cavern is formed, you get a caldera where it collapses in on itself.
What is pushing it out?
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Pressure differentials. Like how a garden hose or shower works. There is a lot of pressure in the magma chamber, and extremely low pressure on the surface.
 
First up some News reports off of the island as more and more homes and businesses get melted and consumed.
It really hits you seeing the Lava destroying a town as opposed to just flowing through the landscape in a surreal light show.

FatalTater said:
I keep watching the volcano and it's making me think thinky thoughts.

If all that magma and gasses and what-have-you come out from under the ground, wouldn't that leave the now-empty area unstable? (I think I've blathered about this before) Is the magma directly below the volcano or coming from somewhere nearby? What is pushing it out?

Why is it that if a glacier so much as sweats a drop of water into the ocean the ecologists are screeching about how the oceans are gonna rise, change the weather patterns and kill us all, but volcanoes get a free pass to barf lava off the coasts of islands and no one bats an eye? I mean, I'm no scientist but I know what happens if I try to put an extra ice cube into my glass of Pepsi on a hot day.

Why can't I stop watching this thing? I have other stuff I should be doing.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ATZY4wntQ0g
Click to expand...
There is a large chamber beneath the Volcano known as the Magma Chamber or reservoir. It gets filled with Lava as pressure from deep in the earth from the subduction of one continental plate under another forces it up. Eventually the pressure in the Magma Chamber reaches the breaking point and it squirts its way upwards resulting in an eruption. Once the Magma is released and the pressure is relieved you will get a sort of giant sinkhole known as the volcano's Caldera. The crater of a volcano. It's best to remember that what we see erupting isn't the Volcano. It's a vent. A small piece of it that is venting out Lava forming a cinder cone etc. The actual full scope of the volcano is much larger and encompasses a much wider radius of the surface.

There are largely two main categories of volcanic eruption types. a Strombolian Type Eruption and a Vesuvian Type. In a Strombolian type the lava has a fairly clear path to the surface so you see heavy lava flows and fairly minor explosions. The building pressure is able to vent itself by direct discharge of the lava. The throat of the Volcano is not blocked. La Palma is a classic Stromboli type. As are the volcano's in Hawaii. There is not much risk of a catastrophic blast that vaporizes the island and is heard around the world.

A Vesuvian Type volcano is where the lava has no free path to escape. So the pressure builds and builds forming a bubble underground, until it releases in explosive destruction. These are the types of Volcano's that let loose with a massive kaboom. And that have terms such as "Pyroclastic Flow" associated with them. Mt St. Helens, Krakatoa, Tambora, Pinatubo are some examples of varying degrees of a Vesuvian Type. You will hear scientists talking about a growing "Lava Dome" inside the volcano, as distortions and bulges are seen at the surface. With an escalating series of earthquakes being common before the earth shattering kaboom.
 
FatalTater said:
I keep watching the volcano and it's making me think thinky thoughts.

If all that magma and gasses and what-have-you come out from under the ground, wouldn't that leave the now-empty area unstable? (I think I've blathered about this before) Is the magma directly below the volcano or coming from somewhere nearby? What is pushing it out?

Why is it that if a glacier so much as sweats a drop of water into the ocean the ecologists are screeching about how the oceans are gonna rise, change the weather patterns and kill us all, but volcanoes get a free pass to barf lava off the coasts of islands and no one bats an eye? I mean, I'm no scientist but I know what happens if I try to put an extra ice cube into my glass of Pepsi on a hot day.

Why can't I stop watching this thing? I have other stuff I should be doing.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ATZY4wntQ0g
Click to expand...

Its fun to watch causeMits unpredictable. Seems to do new tricks every few hours
 
Is the super tsunami threat still there or are we just watching the beginning of the end of this?
 
Henry V said:
Is the super tsunami threat still there or are we just watching the beginning of the end of this?
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Still an unlikely possibility. The volcano is north of the fault zone that cracked open in the 70's so it's earthquakes that'll break it, not the lava flow.
 
Henry V said:
Is the super tsunami threat still there or are we just watching the beginning of the end of this?
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Please bear with me if I am not making sense or am not getting this quite right. The Canary's and La Palma are unusual, even by Volcanic Island standards. They are near vertical pillars up from the seabed rather than the more common broad cones. As you see on La Palma the Lava pours out at an extremely high volume and pressure. This has caused the volcano's under the sea to very quickly build vertically rather than spreading out. Part of the fun is the islands are made up of vertical layers. Hard cooled Lava layers between softer mixes of Ash and Sand. In a geological sense the layers don't adhere very well to each other, and can delaminate under extreme seismic stress. Causing a shear, where a whole side of a pillar/island can fall away into the sea. It's the massive landslide from a shear event that can trigger a tsunami. So the risk doesn't really abate with the lava free flowing. In fact one concern is that new peninsula being formed by the lava. That doesn't have a lot of support underneat it. At some point a large chunk of the outer edge of that will break off, which may then trigger a landslide along with some hydrochloric acid steam explosions as sea water hits the still molten lava inside the rock, as it goes down.

When Plato constructed his thought exercise, his fictional city of Atlantis, it is suspected that at least part of what he put together was based on the Canary's. The whole "Island that sinks into the sea".
 
PotatoSalad4711 said:
154 earthquakes in the last 24 hours (10/9/2021). I’ll just let the screenshots speak for themselves:
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If anyone wants to play with the raw data themselves, it's all here. You have to watch out because that tracks earthquakes in the whole of Spain, so there's the odd one or two elsewhere. The area around Alboran, a little rock in the Med, pops up regularly.
 
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