{"id":24559,"date":"2017-07-04T09:49:15","date_gmt":"2017-07-04T09:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=24559"},"modified":"2017-07-04T09:49:15","modified_gmt":"2017-07-04T09:49:15","slug":"la-palma-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2017\/07\/04\/la-palma-1\/","title":{"rendered":"La Palma – initial images of the “mega-landslide”"},"content":{"rendered":"
La Palma – initial images of the “mega-landslide”<\/h5>\n

I have spent the last three days on the island of La Palma, principally to represent the University of Sheffield<\/a> at the inauguration of the new GOTO telescope<\/a>, yesterday.\u00a0 I was able to take a couple of days over the weekend to visit the site of the famous “mega-landslide” that, some people have suggested, could create a damaging Atlantic tsunami<\/a> (noting of course that I am, like many others<\/a>, a real skeptic of this theory<\/a>).\u00a0 I have written about this slide – and the rather extreme interpretation<\/a> that is needed to generate the sort of tsunami that has hit the headlines – previously, but this was the first time I have visited.\u00a0 In the post I will provide some photos of the site; I will then examine the hypothesis in more detail in a subsequent post.<\/p>\n

The first thing to note is that La Palma is gorgeous, it has been a pleasure to visit.\u00a0 The geology is remarkable too.\u00a0 The hypothesis is that “mega-landslide” would involve a huge mass on the southern end of the island slipping to the west.\u00a0 This is a slide on the flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano – which is fact an elongated volcanic ridge consisting of multiple volcanic cones, some of which date from the 1970s.\u00a0 This is a view along the ridge from the north:-<\/p>\n

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A view looking south along the Cumbre Vieja ridge (in the distance). The “mega-landslide” would involve sliding of the mass to to the west (the right on this photography)<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

This is a view of the Cumbre Vieja ridge from the south:<\/p>\n

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The west flank of the Cumbre Vieja ridge.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

A hike along the ridge gives a good sense of the nature of the volcanic peaks that are supposedly being pulled apart by the potential landslide:-<\/p>\n

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A volcanic peak along the Cumbre Vieja ridge.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

Of course it would be remiss of me not to mention the telescopes that I was there to visit.\u00a0 This is sunset at the observatory:<\/p>\n

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Sunset at the astronomical observatory in La Palma.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

Sometimes its not so hard to be a University Vice-President. \u00a0 I will post some more about the “mega-landslide” in the coming days,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the weekend I was lucky enough to visit the island of La Palma. I have posted some initial images of the site of the Cumbre Vieja “mega-landslide<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":24573,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[469,6243,983,107],"class_list":["post-24559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-images","tag-featured","tag-la-palma","tag-landslide-images","tag-volcano"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}