Something I heard in my travels.. I'll quote most of this word for word as posted at rense.com ..pretty daunting thing to have hanging over your head. Better get me a big gun (surfboard). Here's the story:

A wave higher than Nelson's Column and traveling faster than a jet aircraft will devastate the eastern seaboard of America and inundate much of southern Britain, say scientists who have analyzed 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 Research Center at University 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.

Such a landslide from a future eruption could travel up to 60 kilometers (37 miles) from La Palma's coast, causing the formation and then collapse of a dome of water 900 meters (3,000ft) high and tens of kilometers wide. The bow of this collapsing dome of water would become a giant wave, but also, as the landslide continued to move underwater, a series of crests and troughs would soon generate the "wave train" of the tsunami.

With the leading wave in front and crests pushing it on behind, it would sustain the power for the nine-hour journey to the American east coast.

Tsunami means harbour wave in Japanese and, though the occurrence has nothing to do with the tides, it is often called a tidal wave in English. Throughout history they have caused widespread devastation, with Britain last being affected by one in 1755 when an earthquake in Lisbon caused an unusually large wave to hit southern ports.

The computer model, compiled in collaboration with Steven Ward of the University of California, Santa Cruz, predicts that the tsunami will have a height of 100 metres (330ft) from crest to trough when it crashes into the shores of nearby north-west Africa. By the time it reached its final destination - the east coast of Florida and the Caribbean islands - the tsunami would still be up to 50 metres high.

Low-lying land in Florida would be vulnerable to a sea wave that would inundate the mainland for several kilometres inland. Everything in its path would be flattened, the computer model predicted.

Even though the wave would be much smaller when it reached Britain, it would still breach sea defenses because it would be larger than the biggest storm waves for which they were designed, Dr Day said. "For low-lying land along the south coast it could penetrate up to a mile," he said.

Although there is little doubt that the landslide on La Palma will happen after a volcanic eruption, the difficulty is knowing exactly when it will occur. "Eruptions of Cumbre Vieja occur at intervals of decades to a century or so and there may be a number of eruptions before its collapse," Dr Day said. "Although the year-to-year probability of a collapse is therefore low, the resulting tsunami would be a major disaster with indirect effects around the world."

The scientists are calling for better warning instruments to be placed on La Palma so that an impending eruption can be detected quickly enough to alert other areas that might be affected by a tsunami.

"Cumbre Vieja needs to be monitored closely for any signs of impending volcanic activity and for the deformation that would precede collapse. The collapse will occur during some future eruption after days or weeks of precursory deformation and earthquakes," Dr Day predicted.

"An effective earthquake monitoring system could provide advanced warning of a likely collapse and allow early emergency management organizations a valuable window of time in which to plan and respond," he said.

..update January 2008..

Some of the documents referenced in the comments section I have made a backup of, as I notice a few of the links are dead already. Here are those backups:

• La_Palma_grl.pdf (750kb)
  source: UCSC Earth & Planetary Sciences [link] (Cumbre Vieja La Palma tsunami model).
• WardandDay.pdf (750kb)
  source: Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre [link] (is actually same document as above).
• gdm_la_palma.pdf (3.6MB)
  source: Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre [link] (monitoring program during the mid 1990s).
• CumbreViejaQA.pdf (45kb)
  source: Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre [link] (tsunami threat Q&A).

Thank you to Anna McGuire (benfieldhrc.org) for making the docs available after the links had gone dead.

Everybody is watching the track of Hurricane Isabel at the moment. Fortunately it's dropped from a massive category 5 hurricane (that's as big as it gets) down to a category 2 at present, although the wind speeds have increased a little over the last 12 hours. Right now it's at the very top end of category 2 with just under 110mph wind speeds. Regardless of the recent weakening, it's still expected to be dangerous when it hits the barrier islands on Thursday morning (EST) with a storm surge of up to 11 feet. I've been frequently switching on the weather channel for updates as nearly 250,000 people have been advised to evacuate in North Carolina and Virginia coastal areas - the weather guys there have been predicting swells of up to 25feet! Apparently it is expected to pick up speed as it approaches the coast. I'm wondering if there will be much swell reaching up to NYC in the weekend or early next week as a result.

..update at Thursday 18th 7:01am..

From weather.com: Winds at the buoy well east of Charleston, SC reached near hurricane force before midnight, while wave heights ranged near 30 feet. That buoy quit reporting soon after that..

..update at Thursday 18th 2:30pm..

The hurricane made landfall a while ago and picked up speed (movement north speed, not windspeed) which is actually a good thing as it means there won't be as much rain accumulation and hence less flooding. I watched a little while ago as huge waves came in at Virginia Beach. The pier there had waves coming over the top of it (which means 30 foot easy) and as the weather.com guys were filming it, a big wave took out the end of the pier.. radical.

It's been two years since the World Trade Towers were attacked. Last night I noticed that the twin beams of light pointing straight up into the sky were back on again at the WTC site. Please spare a moment to reflect for the innocent thousands who perished that day.

There is a commemorative ceremony being held at the WTC site as I write which is also being aired on several television channels simultaneously. As was done last year, the names of all the victims of the attack are being read out to mark the anniversary of their passing.

Wow.. they just read the last name and two bugle players have started playing 'the last taps' ..pretty moving stuff. Interesting.. there's some uniformed British Bobbys (policemen) with a full size Union Jack (UK National flag) grouped with a bunch of NYPD who are bearing the US flag all together. Nice show of unity.

Just mentioned on the news: both this year and last year at the WTC site at the very moment the first plane hit, there has been a noticeable gust of wind down in the pit itself on what has otherwise been a relatively calm day. *stare*

The human race may have only 10 years 7 months and 17 days left. As reported on CNN, a giant asteroid is heading for Earth and could hit in 2014, U.S. astronomers have warned British space monitors. Asteroid '2003 QQ47' will be closely monitored over the next two months. Its potential strike date is March 21, 2014, but astronomers say that any risk of impact is likely to decrease as further data is gathered. On impact, it could have the effect of 20 million Hiroshima atomic bombs, a spokesman for the British government's Near Earth Object Information Center told BBC radio. Don't quit your jobs just yet though - the chances of a catastrophic collision are just one in 909,000 at present.