In the UK we often have the perception that natural disasters always seem to happen elsewhere in the world. The closest we seem to get is remote viewing of these events through our TV sets and after a while we may even become hardened to the disturbing images we see.
Take the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, it could never happen here… Or could it?
We believe that it will happen here and that it will be the first major disaster that the UK has to deal with as a result of global warming.
So how could it happen here?
Out in the mid Atlantic the North American tectonic plate meets the Eurasian tectonic plate. This fault line travels north as far as Iceland and is responsible for creating the Mid Atlantic Ridge and Iceland itself. The plates are divergent in that they move apart and as they do so molten rock from below the earth·s crust fills the gap rather like a weld.
Undersea earthquake activity, just south of Iceland only needs to create a ripple on the surface and by the time this ripple reaches the UK west coast it will have formed three waves the last of which will be four to five feet high. (First reported March 2006)
