Atlantic tsunami risk
While only two percent of recorded tsunami have occurred in the Atlantic Basin , the potential still exists here for lethal and destructive tsunami, due either to large submarine earthquakes or to catastrophic landslides at continental margins or from volcanic ocean islands. Tsunami as high as 12m generated by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake killed several thousand people in Portugal, with damage - and probably loss of life - extending as far afield as Cadiz in Spain and the NW coast of Africa. Even in the Caribbean , the tsunami were 6-7 m high and caused significant damage. The Caribbean is also prone to its own tsunami, triggered by large, local earthquakes, and many deaths are attributed to quakes in Haiti in 1842 and the Dominican Republic in 1946. In 1929, a 10m high tsunami caused by an earthquake and submarine landslide in the Canadian Grand Banks resulted in 30 deaths in Newfoundland , while the same year a tsunami of unknown source is reported to have killed one person and injured others along the UK south coast at Brighton . In 1580, a Magnitude ~ 5.9 earthquake in the English Channel is reported to have triggered tsunami that inundated Dover , Boulogne and Calais , leading to hundreds of deaths. Around 7,000 years ago, a gigantic sediment slide off the coast of Norway (the Storegga Slide)generated waves as high as 25m that inundated parts of the coastlines of NE Scotland , the Shetlands and Orkneys , Iceland and Greenland.
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