Can England get tsunamis

Answer 1

Most definatley, back in 1755 there was an earth quake in Lisbon, this caused a Tsunami to hit Mount's Bay, although the subdued waves had little effect.

Below is areport from Steve Connor, science editor of the Independant paper, London.

A wave higher than Nelson's Column and travelling faster than a jet aircraft will devastate the eastern seaboard of America and inundate much of southern Britain, say scientists who have analysed the effects of a future volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands.

A massive slab of rock twice the volume of the Isle of Man would break away from the island of La Palma and smash into the Atlantic Ocean to cause a tsunami - a monster wave - bigger than any recorded, the scientists warned yesterday.

Most of the wave's energy, equivalent to the combined output of America's power stations for six months, would travel westwards to the American coast but enough would be flicked north towards the English Channel to cause catastrophic coastal damage.

A computer model has been designed to show the way the tsunami will build after the volcano, called Cumbre Vieja, erupts on La Palma, at the western end of the Spanish island chain. It describes the almost unimaginable scale of an event that the scientists say could happen at any time within the foreseeable future.

"We're looking at an event that could be decades or a century away - but there will be a degree of warning beforehand," said Simon Day, of the Benfield Greg Hazard Reseach Centre at Univeristy College London.

Most of the rocky western flank of Cumbre Vieja is unstable enough to be dislodged in the next big eruption of the volcano, which is active enough to explode at least once or twice a century. Its last big event was in 1949.

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Edited March 2011.

Just to add that recent research has shown that this original report of vast Tsunami waves from the Cumbre Viega volcano can be now partly dismissed. It is now thought that any landslip on this volcano will be gradual and not fast.

According to the DEFRA report, commissioned after the 2004 Indonesian Tsunami, on potential impact of future Tsunami on Britain. It is now estimated that the wave size to hit the UK is now only around 2m.

However the Lisbon quake could be repeated and so another small Tsunami might hit the Mount's bay area again, but you will get around 4 hours warning, but it won't be huge like the ones in the pacific, just some larger waves than normal, up to around 2.4 m.

Answer 2

Tsunamis are the result of the displacement of large bodies of water in oceans. The best known triggers are earthquakes but other events such as land slips can cause them. Although England is not in a high risk region for a tsunami to affect it, almost any coastline can be affected by a tsunami given the right conditions.