Natural disasters in the UK

[Nevermay]

From another thread......! I am seriously amazed, and pretty disturbed at the number of posters who seem to think the UK is somehow living a charmed life whereby no natural disaster will ever occur here!

I did think that some of the population have displayed a very entitled attitude in recent years when they have had to make adjustments for dangerous situation, such as feeling seriously hard done by, even "traumatised" by having to socially distance during lockdown, or expecting red carpet treatment and being looked after as a special case when caught up in wild fires, rather than just dealing with the situation as it is, as other populations more used to danger did.

Meteor strikes, for example - we have the technology, and the international cooperation, to predict and prevent an "extinction level event" such as the one which wiped out the dinosaurs. But there are millions of near earth objects, and we can't track them all. Small meteorites hit regularly, medium ones hit occasionally, and no one can predict when one the wrong size on the wrong trajectory will destroy a city or populated area, even a small country.

There are supervolcanoes and they do erupt - not sure why people seem to think it won't affect the UK if it happens, as we are directly in the firing line of one of those most likely to blow,

Tsunamis - massive tsunamis have hit the Uk in the past, and are likely to do so again, why would they not? Especially as their origin and cause is very unclear,

We are very lucky in that we have been relatively safe in the recent few hundred years, but its very naive to assume we can take it for granted we always will be. And what we gain in terms of relative geographical security, we lose in terms or resilience and preparedness, so in some ways are more vulnerable to natural disasters than societies that plan for and expect them

( and that is before we even begin on the possibilities of man made disasters.....)

The biggest risks in the UK are floods, reservoir damage, coastal erosion, drought particularly in the East and wildfires on agricultural land more so than else where.

yep & far more likely than a super volcano

I dunno, I'm actually fairly convinced by aliens after the recent Congressional hearing 😁 Have to say that has worried me given me slight pause for thought more than tsunamis and volcanic eruptions recently!

The origin and causes of tsunamis is unclear?

are they caused by giant serpents?

So we're supposed to prepare for a tsunami that may happen at some point in the next 300 years? What?

140,000 acres of land were flooded, 32,000 people were evacuated, 24,000 properties were damaged, 46,000 farm animals were killed, and 307 people died on land.

It was a terrible event, and as the economy had not yet recovered from the war it was particularly damaging.

But in comparison with the entire land mass and population of the UK, it was not a major disaster.

Remember that around 230,000 and 250,000 people died in the flu in epidemic of 1918-19 (estimates vary). 33,000 died in the 1957 flu epidemic.

The greatest threat we face is still epidemic disease. Flooding and connected risks like landslides are increasing but loss of life in these events is still relatively small.

Exactly what I was thinking. Similar way of writing. And it looks like this is the second attempt to pull people into a ridiculous argument about volcanoes.

I’d hate to be in your head 😱

@Luckydog7 weren't the moors on fire a few times in recent years? And a grass fire destroyed half a street somewhere.

This.

I think you may have issues OP tbh.. I'm a worrier but you are catastrophising.

We had a lit of fires last year around here.

@ghostyslovesheets ,
“The cause of tsunamis is unclear?”

Could be the giant serpents you mention, but when a dd was working in Aceh, Indonesia right after the Asian tsunami of 2004, a local imam was quite sure of the cause.
It was entirely down to ungodly behaviour within Aceh - a cinema! And a swimming pool! So Allah sent the tsunami to teach them a lesson.

I'm most concerned with the shops running out of tinfoil. That is a definite possibility.

Worry about the amount of shit uk now has in it's waters rather than potential vulcano eruption god knows where in 300 years.

You are just having hissy fot because people didn't agree with you on previous thread

Could be the giant serpents you mention

Noooo, I am sure it's not the same
The other one is proper unhinged

Isn't is a comparative thing? Natural disasters are possible in the UK, but compared to many places, the are much less common.

We don't have to have alert systems for various natural disasters. We don't have to adapt our buildings because of the risks.

What is the point in benefitting from lower risks if we then still fret about them?

Well, to be fair, we do have an alert system - it was tested the other month.
https://www.gov.uk/alerts

And we will have to adapt some buildings to flooding in particular - a fair proportion are at current and future flood risk - though not to earthquakes.

The emergency alerts are currently likely to be about just such climate related events - severe floods, fires, extreme weather.

Disease, climate change and infrastructure failure are the things we need to pay attention to. Tsunamis, volcanoes, asteroids - the stuff of Hollywood films - much less so.

Tsunamis - massive tsunamis have hit the Uk in the past, and are likely to do so again

OP, what is your definition of the word “likely”? I suspect that we will disagree

Also, massive tsunamis hitting what is now the UK... Two in over 8,000 years.

The origin and cause of Tsunami is not unclear. In the simplest sense it involves a displacement of the sea floor - that might be caused by, for example, seismic activity (an earthquake), volcanic activity (deforming the ground) or a submarine landslide. Predicting which e.g. submarine earthquakes will or won’t produce a tsunami is more complex hence any submarine quake of significant magnitude will trigger a tsunami warning. The most likely candidate to cause a Tsunami that would impact the U.K. would be an eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands leading to a flank collapse - I.e. the side of the volcano becoming a landslide and falling into the sea. Like any volcano is it monitored to the n-th degree. Predicting tsunami height is also a bit more complicated. I won’t personally be living in fear of one here in the U.K. (and for that I am thankful) if I lived near a beach in Indonesia then I might be a bit more concerned.
Supervolcano wise, the nearest one to us is Campi Flegri which is partially under the bay of Naples but the last eruption of a supervolcano was Taupo 26k years ago, so yeah they’re a bit rare and there’s actually naff all we could realistically do about it. (You can’t stop a volcano…) There have been plenty of large eruptions more recently that have, temporarily, affected widespread areas and/or global populations. The Thera eruption, Krakatoa and Tambora eruptions, Pinatubo are all examples.
Meteor strikes… well mammals survived the last really big one without the benefit of concrete bunkers so…
TL:DR - we can’t control natural geological processes. We’d either adapt and survive or not. Worrying/panicking achieves very little especially when the chance of living through a 1 in 100k year event is pretty darn small (but never zero! 😜) especially when you live in a country that isn’t exactly on top of them. Support your friendly neighbourhood scientists and don’t hoard tinned beans!

Risk is assessed by how dangerous something is, but also how likely it is to happen. Therefore all these events are not worth worrying about.

I'm beginning to think it's going to take a supervolcano to stop you posting about this OP

And yes, as PP have said, there are more frequent, likely events to be concerned about if you really must worry about something.

Bingo. And you only put resources into risk control and mitigation to the extent that there’s something you can usefully do.
We could have war declared on us. Why haven’t the government provided us all with bomb shelters?
A plane could crash on a hospital. Why aren’t hospitals built underground under 5 metre thick reinforced concrete, because of this grave risk that would have catastrophic consequences?
There are some risks that we accept, because realistically we’ve done all we can / there isn’t a fat lot we can do / the resources are better spent on plausible risks.

Whenever I hear of yet another British dentist or doctor heading off to New Zealand or Australia for the good life, I reflect on the fact that we’re comparatively geologically stable in the U.K. with a far more temperate climate - particularly in Scotland. I also appreciate the lack of flora and fauna that is lethal to humans.

This, but in addition what you can actually do about it.

I think Martin Rees made the point with the LHC or some other high energy physics experiment.

There is an argument that a high energy physics experiment could create a black hole that would consume the earth. The chances of this were very small, but the consequences very great. That multiples up to some finite risk. However because we have control over the experiments we choose to do we can choose whether or not to do that particular experiment (as a by product this concept could also be used to explain the Fermi Paradox).

With something like a super volcano the consequences are great, the chances of it happening are small, just like the black hole creation. But we have zero ability to influence whether it actually happens. The question I guess is whether it happens on a frequent enough timescale for us to consider some mitigation strategy to survive it, but my guess is that strategy would cost an awful lot of money - maybe the spread to interplanetary living that Hawking suggested.