I'm only 5 miles from the shore, but according to estimates of ocean rise, I should be safe as well. I'm 100 ft above sea level, but most estimates predict a 20 - 30 ft rise in sea level according to all this doomsday glacial melt.

Furthermore, seismically, the East Coast is stable. We have small quakes from time to time. Chances of a major earthquake would generally involve a sudden widening of of the mid-Atlantic ridge. The fault lines here tend to be much older than those in the mid-west or the West Coast, and hence are more stable.

Even so, I'm willing to guess that a major quake near New Madrid would actually be felt here in the northeast. That's only because those quakes tend to be so strong as 300 years of landlocked plate tension is relieved all at once. We've only had two quakes in Connecticut that reached 3.0 during my lifetime. The first one was enough to rattle plates and open cabinet doors. The second one I never noticed until I heard about it in the news....and then I went, "Oh yeah....that's what I felt."

you guys on the east coast should be worried about the canary islands landslide, which would cause what they call a "mega-tsunami...half of one the islands there is poised to slide into the sea from the side of a volcano.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e8CRE3lRdA

We're shielded from such by Long Island. We might experience flooding along the CT coast, but would likely be spared from the actual tsunami. I actually live on the edge of an ancient glacial valley that extends down to Long Island Sound, so I would likely see some flooding even in my area.

I would be more worried about the impact of a tsunami from the Canary Islands impacting the coast from Florida to North Carolina, and maybe up into the Chesapeake Bay. If a tsunami got in there, it might be even worse than areas further south.

the only reason i mentioned it was because of this incident in alaska in 1958, the biggest tsunami ever recorded, at 1750 feet tall...

http://www.usc.edu/dept/tsunamis/alaska/1958/webpages/index.html

click on the "close-up view of Lituya Bay," link for more details on it...

Yeah, I've done a little book and film research on that. The inlet and fjords created a funnel effect as the sheer volume of water had no place to go but up.

I actually have a DVD on tsunami's called Ocean Fury which my family brought back from Alaska. It documents the 1964 tsunami that hit the Kenai Peninsula and the science behind tsunami preparedness. One of the residents interviewed actually tried to outrun the wave in his pickup truck, but the wave was so fast it caught him. The wave lifted and carried the truck, spinning it while completely submerged. When it was over, the truck was something like 1 1/2 miles from where the wave first hit it, and both men survived, shaken, but otherwise unharmed.

If you can ever get a hold of that video, it's interesting to watch. It only runs about 30 minutes, but it's worth it.

i also read there were 2 boats in the bay at the time it happened, where the people in one boat all died, and the people in the second boat lived, but were placed about halfway up a mountain...

Yeah, I had to edit because I vaguely remember that the two tsunamis were separate incidents in a close time frame.

The one you referenced was actually fictionalized in James Michener's Alaska where two hunters were climbing a mountain to escape the tsunami, but the wave actually knocked over trees as high as 800 ft up.

The Canary Islands Government has said it is monitoring an earthquake swarm on the small island of El Hierro where in excess of 400 tremors of low magnitude have been recorded in the past four days. On Friday, the Ministry of Economy, Finance and Government Security Canary convened the first ever meeting of the Steering Committee and Volcanic Monitoring, reflected in the Specific Plan Protection Civil and Emergency for Volcanic Risk, given what it described “the significant increase in seismic activity”.A statement (translated from Spanish) issued following the meeting outlined:

“This committee met this morning (Friday) at the headquarters of the Directorate General Security and Emergency Tenerife, established after the assessment of information gathered from seismic and volcanological last July 17 by the National Geographic Institute (IGN) and Volcanological Institute of the Canary Islands, the situation is total normal for the green light for the information population, activating mechanisms for monitoring and oversight needed to coordinate the actions of self civil population and information contained in the Plan.” “According to data provided by the seismic monitoring station IGN’s located in Valverde, one can conclude that from the noon on July 17 there has been a significant increase of low magnitude seismic activity in the municipality of Border of the island of El Hierro. To improve the location of this activity, has deployed a seismic network densification operational since July 21 has helped increase the number of earthquakes located, and can be viewed at Web www.ign.es”, the statement added. El Hierro, a 278.5 km2 island, is situated in the most southwestern extreme of the Canaries. The origins of the island date back some 100 million years. After three successive eruptions, and consequent accumulations, the island emerged from the ocean as an imposing triangular pyramid crowned by a volcano more than 2,000 metres high. The volcanic activity, principally at the convergence of the three ridges, resulted in the continual expansion of the island. A mere 50,000 years ago, as a result of seismic tremors which produced massive landslides, a giant piece of the island cracked off, crashed down into the ocean and scattered along the seabed.

This landslide of more than 300km3 gave rise to the impressive amphitheatre of the El Golfo valley and at the same time caused a tsunami that most likely rose over 100 metres high and probably reached as far as the American coast. According to ElHierro.com: “Although over 200 years have elapsed since the last eruption, El Hierro has the largest number of volcanoes in the Canaries with over 500 open sky cones, another 300 covered by the most recent outflows, and some 70 caves and volcanic galleries, notably the Don Justo cave whose collection of channels surpasses 6km in length.”

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/site/?pageid=event_desc&edis_id=EQ-20110724-31716-SPI

All I know first hand about earth changes is that its getting hotter and hotter here in Colorado. But I heard that it is even hotter than that in Iraq and the middle east.

here is an article that might have something to do with this...



© NASA
Data from GRACE, twin satellites launched in 2002 that make precise measurements of Earth's gravity, suggest ice loss is in fact changing the shape of our planet.

(ISNS) - Like many of its inhabitants, the Earth is getting thicker around the middle - that's what a new study out this week says. The increased bulge is due to the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

The Earth was never perfectly round to begin with, due to its spin. Just as an ice skater's skirt flutters up and away from her skates during her pirouette, water on Earth is more concentrated at the equator than at the poles.

As recently as 22,000 years ago, several miles of ice covered much of the northern hemisphere. Since the downward pressure of land-based ice has reduced as the ice melted, the land underneath has "rebounded" causing the Earth to become more spherical, said Steve Nerem, an aerospace engineer at the University of Colorado at Boulder and co-author of a new analysis of the Earth's bulge.

"It's a bit like a sponge, and it takes a while to come back to its original shape," Nerem said.

Scientists had observed the bulge shrinking for years, but then something changed. Around the middle of the 1990s, they noticed that the trend reversed and the Earth was getting fatter, like a ball squeezed at the top and bottom -- but until recently they didn't have the tools to understand why.

Gravity depends on mass, so any changes to the Earth's shape changes the distribution of mass, and therefore its gravity field. Data from GRACE, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment -- twin satellites launched in 2002 that make exacting measurements of Earth's gravity field to monitor changes in ice mass, the amount of water in the ocean and losses in continental water -- enabled the researchers to test a theory that the ice loss was changing the shape of the planet. GRACE took snapshots of the surface of the Earth every 30 days, allowing researchers to monitor changes in ice mass from the changes in the gravitational fields.

They found that melting glaciers Greenland and Antarctica were indeed the biggest contributors to the Earth's growing spare tire, as the huge amount of water was pulled to the equator. According to the researchers, the two regions are losing a combined 382 billion tons of ice a year. While the reduced mass on the continents will allow the land to spring back and make the planet more round, that process takes thousands of years. And in the meantime, the bulge is growing at about .28 inches per decade.

The planet's radius is about 13 miles bigger at the equator than at the poles right now, says Nerem. This means that the point on the Earth's surface furthest away from its center is not the summit of Everest but rather the top of an Ecuadorian volcano.

All this adds up to a strong signal that the planet is changing.

"This is another strong indicator of what's going on in the climate," said Byron Tapley, director for space research at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the current study. "How mass works in the Earth's system is a very dynamic process, and with a record of almost ten years [with GRACE] we're able to get a much better picture of what's going on."

Nerem says that one danger in the future of the research is that the GRACE satellites will fail sometime soon, probably within the year. While NASA is planning another satellite launch, the technology won't go up until 2016, leaving gaps in the timeline of scientific data.

"We're going to lose our eye in the sky," Nerem said.

All of this makes sense. In fact, it also applies to the atmosphere due to centrifugal force. At the poles, the atmosphere is thinner than at the equator. Hence, greenhouses gases and ozone tend to have higher concentrations near the equator, meaning that any greenhouse warming will be concentrated on the tropics. This is also why the hole in the ozone layer appeared over Antarctica rather than elsewhere. Unlike the arctic, Antarctica is mainly a landmass with mountains and glaciers, thinning the atmosphere even more, making it the weakest point for the ozone layer.

Virtually all weather cycles on Earth are fueled by the tropics and the polar regions - the hottest and coldest regions on the planet. The interaction between the two is responsible for both air and water currents, along with a few other lesser geothermic influences.

Even in this, the Earth's rotation plays a role. Cyclonic storms (typhoons, hurricanes, tropical storms, and such) travel west before bending toward the pole of their hemisphere. Eventually, they will loop back to the east, or even sometimes complete a circle before doing so. So, a storm formed just north of the equator will turn north. One formed south of the equator will turn south. This is because of how the Earth's spin interacts with the storm's own rotation.

What this all means is that glacial melt heading to the equator due to warming will fuel storm cycles. Increased warming will intensify those storm cycles. Eventually this will fuel arctic or antarctic storms which will rebuild or repair glaciers in those regions. As of right now, we have no way of knowing the extent or the impact of such a process because we only have reliable weather records for the past 100 years or so. We can only guess and run computer models while trying to reduce the margin of error by collecting more, and better, data.

As far as landmass compression due to glacial weight, this has long been known. In fact, the Great Lakes were formed during the last Ice Age, not by being gouged out by the glaciers, but rather by land sinking under the weight of glaciers. The land is slowly rebounding, and the Great Lakes grow shallower each year as a result - faster than the rate of sediment would allow. This is possible because the Earth's mantle - layer beneath the Earth's outer surface, aka the crust - has elasticity and "floats" on the surface of the outer core. Think of a buoy on water. You can push it, or drag it, underneath the surface, but the minute you release it, the buoy rises back to the surface. The Earth's landmass reacts the same way.

In fact, it is likely that if an ocean or sea were ever to run dry, the floor would begin to rise because there is no water weight holding it down. An example of this may be the Great Basin of the U.S., which was once an inland sea. Collision of tectonic plates may have risen the original elevation causing the sea waters to begin draining, carving canyons as they ran to the ocean. As the waters receding, the elevation continued rising to their natural height. Then perhaps further plate collision raised them to their present elevation, which is about 4,000 feet at their lowest points and over 12,000 ft at the highest points.

You may note that I don't provide links to support this. That's because most of the information can easily be found through a Google search. Personally, I'm going from memory of the 5 or so books plus a handful of articles I've read.

I think it's Oprah.

did gain more weight again?

So tempted to make a bunch of bad "crack" jokes right now...