no, not the movie director. it's a volcanic island in the Canaries located about 28.6ºN, 17.9ºW. and it maybe the next deadly GG. what's a GG? a GG is a "global geophysical event". and it's Bad with a capital "B". or it's all a scam to sell a boatload of insurance policies.

the tsunami we experienced here on dec 26th made me vaguely recall a bbc horizon program on mega-tsunami from a few years ago (no, my head isn't just full of spider webs and stuff about coldfusion i18n). some googling refreshed my memory enough that i thought i should blog something about this.

the western flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma island is basically being held in place by the natural equivalent of spit and duct tape (friction). if this 10-20 kilometers (yes kilometers) long huge chunk of rock lets loose it will cause a 20-50 meter tsunami that could devastate the coastal areas of North America, Europe and parts of Africa. what could cause that to happen? well a volcanic eruption might do the trick. which is kind of inevitable on that volcanic island. the volcano last erupted in 1949 and then it's whole western side slid some 4 meters closer to the sea. oh my--but read on.

while i certainly hope this is a "chicken little" issue, it has been picked up by Time in an on-line time article. it's been slashdotted as well (not that it lends it much credence but it has been noticed by that crowd). then there's the Gwynne Dyer article which has some chilling thoughts on the political angle of these sorts of things (basically the "i'd rather not know" policy). while there has been some research on the island itself by the Benfield Hazard Research Centre at University College, London the research has been called into question as it was funded by insurance companies.

you can read some of the details about this volcano at volcano world. frankly i don't know what to make of this but having seen what happens when nobody's watching, i say better safe than sorry.

this an official missing persons website setup by Thailand's IT research hotshots (NECTEC) and the Thai Red Cross. another english language site can be found at INET (one of Thailand's leading ISP). besides the missing person registration there is a page for donations.

also one of the Kingdom's TV stations this afternoon reported that the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology would be establishing a website dedicated to this disaster, www.thaitsunami.com, right this second it appears as some domain parking lot. maybe the name servers aren't updated yet.

the official site www.disaster.go.th seems to be mostly unreachable right now (maybe swamped). here is a list of sites containing unofficial information concerning the victims of this disaster in Thailand:

• pantip.com (popular local chat/message board site)
• manager magazine
• www.phuketitcity.com (victim list and contact numbers)
• www.disaster.go.th (might be cached)
• vatcheera phuket hospital
• victim lists (all phuket hospitals)
• the following links are pretty gruesome, photos of unidentified victims
  at patong hospital
  at kathu police station
  at thalang hospital
• embassy contacts

the year seems to be ending with an awful bang. as you probably already know, my neck of the woods (south/south east asia) got sucker punched the day after Christmas. a series of tsunamis generated by a 9.0 undersea earthquake (revised from an initial 8.9) devastated coastal areas all around the andaman sea and indian ocean. one of Thailand's main tourist destinations, Phuket Island and the surrounding area, got hammered. sadly it looks like the regional death toll will be more than 10,000 people.

frankly we have no experience with this sort of thing--TV news and talk shows were actually reporting the Sumatra quake when it occurred but nobody, officially or otherwise, made the connection to the subsequent tsunamis. there have also been reports that when the initial event caused the sea to recede, people actually went out to investigate--Hawaiians or Japanese would probably have started running for high ground.

and if you too think tsunamis are confined to the Pacific area, think again. historically there are very few coastal areas (that's an arcIMS application BTW) that have not experienced a tsunami event. the east coast of the US, Ireland, even Britain have been hit in the past. there are two good data resources for this:

• tsunami event database
• tsunami runup database

a couple of months ago i built a quake RSS CFC to replace an aging "finger" parser tag for USGS quake data. as you can see, there are still a significant number of aftershocks still going on. and if my structural geology knowledge has not completely turned to chaos, a 7+ earthquake in the right spot (deep water, thick sedments) might generate another tsunami. i hope not.