ABSTRACT:

We perform numerical simulations of wave generation by the potential flank collapse of the Cumbre Vieja Volcano (CVV; La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain). Subaerial slide scenarios are first defined based on recent slope stability studies of CVV; the identified scenarios have smaller volumes than those proposed by Ward and Day (2001), in the pioneering work that triggered the interest of the research community for CVV. Simulations of tsunami sources are performed using the previously validated (Abadie et al., 2010) 3D incompressible multifluid Navier-Stokes model THETIS. Both 2D and 3D simulations (the latter using a cylindrical mesh) are performed, which investigate near field wave generation. Results show that a slide of 60–70 km3 would have very significant consequences, at least for la Palma and other surrounding islands. Far field waves (tsunamis) are simulated in the 2D horizontal, fully nonlinear and dispersive, Boussinesq model FUNWAVE, which is initialized with the 3D Navier-Stokes solution. Results of preliminary tests are shown in the paper and more results will be presented at the conference.

INTRODUCTION

Since the pioneering, but controversial, work of Ward and Day (2001), the potential flank collapse of the Cumbre Vieja Volcano (CVV) on La Palma island (Canary Islands, Spain; Fig. 1) has been the object of numerous studies of the related tsunami hazard. Their simulations resulted in extremely large local waves, which reached still up to a 20 meters elevation, in the far field off of the US East coast (particularly in Florida). This catastrophic landslide scenario was severely criticized (e.g., Mader, 2001; or Pararas-Carayannis, 2002) as well as the wave modeling approach used in the work. Masson et al. (2002, 2006) later found evidences of past large paleo-submarine landslides of O(100 km3) volume, around the canary islands, at least demonstrating that such events were not purely speculative.

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