A team including ELSI scientist George Helffrich doing field work on islands in the Atlantic Ocean finds deposits left by a 170 m high tsunami. The tsunami was caused by the failure of the flank of a volcano, called Fogo, located 55 kilometers away. The flank of Fogo collapsed suddenly and catastrophically 73,000 years ago. The impact of the tsunami on the coastline of a nearby island in the Cape Verde archipelago carried 700 ton boulders up to heights of 270 m above sea level. Their main point was to show that volcano flank collapses can happen suddenly and are a hazard to be factored into regional disaster prevention scenarios in ocean basins. Though they are energetic events, they happen only rarely and pose no immediate threat.

Publication

Ramalho, R. S., Winckler, G., Madeira, J., Helffrich, G. R., Hipolito, A., Quartau, R., Adena, K., Schaefer, J. M. (2015). Hazard potential of volcanic flank
collapses raised by new megatsunami evidence, Science Advances, v.1,
doi:10.1126/sciadv.1500456.
(Online Open Access link: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/9/e1500456)