Near- And Far-field Tsunami Hazard From the Potential Flank Collapse of the Cumbre Vieja Volcano

Abstract

As demonstrated in the pioneering (but still controversial) work by Ward and Day (2001), the potential flank collapse of the Cumbre Vieja Volcano (CVV) on La Palma (Canary Islands) could result in a large tsunami having effects throughout the North Atlantic Ocean. While recent studies have suggested that such a collapse would likely result in more moderate tsunami waves than originally thought, these would still cause devastating effects in the near-field on neighboring Canary Islands, and their far-field coastal hazard would still be significant at some locations, and hence ought to be assessed. Abadie et al. (2011) simulated landslide tsunami generation from various CVV flank collapse scenarios, using a 3D Navier-Stokes (NS) multi-fluid VOF model (THETIS) with implicit slide motion. As 3D-NS computations are both too computationally demanding and affected by numerical diffusion, they computed near-field impact in a coupled long-wave Boussinesq model (FUNWAVE-TVD).