La Palma

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La Palma, a Spanish island, is one of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean off Africa.

In a BBC Horizon program broadcast on October 12, 2000, two scientists used this surface anomaly to claim that half of La Palma slipped four meters downwards into the Atlantic Ocean. They believe that this process was driven by the pressure caused by the rising magma heating and vaporizing water trapped within the structure of the island. They projected that during a future eruption, the western half of the island, weighing perhaps 500 billion tonnes, could slide into the ocean. This could generate a giant wave known as a megatsunami around 900 m high in the region of the islands. The wave would fan out across the Atlantic and strike the Caribbean and the eastern American seaboard some eight hours later with a wave possibly 90 m or more high causing massive devastation along the coastlines. The incident was further explored in a BBC docu-drama called End Day which went through several hypothetical events of disastrous proportions..