Why I don't invest in properties with ocean views

(Well, apart from the fact that I have no spare money, that is.)

This article missed my attention last week, but it's a good one from the New York Times, about research into the question of whether ocean hitting asteroids have caused gigantic tsunamis within very recent times (the last 10,000 years.) The story opens:

At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.

On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface.

The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land.

For those who like thinking about global disasters, there are lots of links about tsunamis generally, including asteroid generated ones, here. For example, there is a link to an article abstract about evidence for 3 tsunamis in the last 10,000 years in the Shetland Islands in Scotland:

Coastal fen- and lake deposits enclose sand layers that record at least three Holocene tsunamis at the Shetland Islands. The oldest is the well-known Storegga tsunami (ca 8100 cal yr BP), which at the Shetlands invaded coastal lakes and ran up peaty hillsides where it deposited sand layers up to 9.2 m above present high tide level. Because sea level at ca 8100 cal yr BP was at least 10–15 m below present day sea level, the runup exceeded 20 m. In two lakes, we also found deposits from a younger tsunami dated to ca 5500 cal yr BP. The sediment facies are similar to those of the Storegga tsunami—rip-up clasts, sand layers, re-deposited material and marine diatoms. Runup was probably more than 10 m. Yet another sand layer in peat outcrops dates to ca 1500 cal yr BP. This sand layer thins and fines inland and was found at two sites 40 km apart and traced to ca 5–6 m above present high tide. The oldest tsunami was generated by the Storegga slide on the Norwegian continental slope. We do not know what triggered the two younger events.

My personal contingency plan if an asteroid hits the Pacific is to get to Toowoomba. It's less than an hour from where I live (at high speed), assuming of course that thousands of cars are not jammed on the 4 lane highway with the same idea.

(By the way: Firefox got stuck while I was typing this and had to be shut down. But I am happy to find that the "restore session" feature of Firefox 2 means my half finished entry had also been saved. Great!)