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We're all doomed! Oh, wait...maybe not.

We had a small temblor here in the San Francisco Bay Area a few weeks ago, a 3.5 magnitude earthquake (We joke that we use these low-magnitude earthquakes to stir our coffee). Nevertheless, it did raise a bit of concern. One commenter on Facebook posted that the earth was moving under the Kilauea volcano, that eruption was imminent, and that it would spawn a 100-foot tsunami in Hawaii, with a wall of water 100 feet high hitting California within 5 hours. He claimed the source was the USGS.

Over the years I’ve grown a bit weary of correcting a lot of the nonsense that passes for news on Facebook, but I made an exception in this case and double checked the USGS Volcano Hazards, Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, and the Hawaii Office of Civil Defense sites. As expected, there was no such warning and I posted a pithy message squelching the rumor.

The problem with this type of misinformation is that there is sometimes a kernel of truth at its core and people frequently confuse possibility and probability.

Is a mega-tsunami possible in Hawaii? There is evidence in the geological record that the Hawaiian Islands have suffered over 70 collapses over the past 20 million years that spawned large tsunamis. Kilauea is moving, with the last shift of 10 centimeters occurring in 2000. Scientists project that a collapse of Kilauea would spawn a tsunami like the one described by my nervous friend: 300-meter waves locally and 30-meter waves striking the West Coast. Fortunately, the probability of such an event occurring in the immediate future is low. Don't cancel your Hawaiian vacation.

How do we counter this type of misinformation? I wish I had a good answer. I think all we can do is to try to educate people on where to find accurate information and try to correct bad information when we find it. Unfortunately, people are quick to pass on misinformation without double checking it and don’t always pass on the corrections, so it’s a never ending and thankless task. But then, who ever said our job was easy?

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