Today’s oceanographic PSA that you need to know about right now so you can start planning your dream wedding as a bride of Neptune tonight comes courtesy of Scientists who have discovered that a giant slab of sea floor next to the beating heart of Tourism Australia, the Great Barrier Reef, is starting to break away, threatening to trigger a tsunami that would break both The Reef and our hearts.
According to reports in The Telegraph, research published in the Nature Hazards journal [“a dangerously good read but no stars ever!”] says that a one cubic kilometre slab in the Coral Sea – affectionately titled The Noggin Block – will eventually collapse.
Dr Robin Beaman, a marine geologist from James Cook University, told The ABC that the everyone’s worst new best friend Noggin is “[in] the very slow, early stages of starting to break away from the edge of the Great Barrier Reef. If it were to break away catastrophically, that is break away really quickly, what that would do is create a surface wave above it. It would actually cause a tsunami. That tsunami would travel across the Great Barrier Reef, it’s about 70 kilometres offshore, and it would impact the local area, the North Queensland area.”
After causing everyone to promptly shit themselves while wearing full body steamers that they quickly donned because there’s no time to waste, Dr Beaman said that the slab currently appears stable and is only likely to move should a trigger of catastrophic proportions – say, an earth quake summoned from the depths by a salty bearded sea dog with a trident – cause it to collapse.
While that’s “unlikely” it’s not “unheard of” and it has obviously “happened before” meaning that the slab “will in any case eventually collapse.”
Said Beaman, “We don’t really know when such a block might collapse. All I can say is sometime it eventually will… We’re not trying to alarm people, but we need to know it is there and what could happen when it falls.“
Bloody hell. Best of luck to you and yours as you make arrangements to make the transition from your landlubber existence into your new watery prison home as smooth as possible, because life is now a Kevin Costner movie waiting to happen.
via The ABC
