"God is for us a shelter and a strength, a help in troubles; He is very accessible. Therefore we will not fear when the earth changes and when mountains totter into the heart of seas."
(Tehillim 46.2-3)
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| ASHQELON, ISRAEL |
It could "cause a landslide that rapidly enters into the sea -- which would cause a tsunami."Not a question of "if," but "when."
The destruction of Mount Etna would be catastrophic, but it wouldn’t be unprecedented. “We know from the geological record that volcanoes with gravitational instability have collapsed,” Morelia Urlaub, Ph.D., a marine geodynamics researcher at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany and the paper’s first author, tells Inverse. “So there could be a chance that Etna’s flank may also collapse and cause a landslide that rapidly enters into the sea — which would cause a tsunami.” Understanding how and why the volcano moves and shifts will help scientists inform the public about the risks they face by living in the shadow of Mount Etna.
The volcano’s precarious state wouldn’t be a big deal if it was in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, it’s surrounded by cities, towns, and farms, where the local wine industry benefits from the fertile volcanic soil. About 8,000 years ago, its eastern flank is thought to have collapsed, triggering a tsunami that destroyed a coastal community in present-day Israel, over 1,000 miles away across the Mediterranean Sea.
...while previous research suggested that a huge volcanic eruption might be the event that destabilizes Mount Etna and causes a large portion of it to collapse, it turns out that the more common occurrence of tectonic plate boundary shifts could actually be the factor that pushes the volcano over the edge. In fact, such a shift and collapse could actually trigger an eruption, multiplying the potential damage.
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