Disasters are ranked according to both their potential for damage and the likelihood that they will occur in the next five years. An influenza pandemic, for example, is considered both likely and serious, while wildfires are both less damaging and about a hundred times less likely. Disasters sometimes change rank depending on new information—between 2013 and 2015 “public unrest” became less likely, somehow—but the overall list of disasters is generally the same each time. Tsunamis, probably owing to the UK’s lack of seismic activity, have never made it into the register.
But that could change in future editions. A group of over 30 UK scientists, representing 11 different universities and research institutes, are busy studying a lesser-understood type of tsunami, caused by enormous underwater landslides instead of earthquakes. These “submarine slides” have happened in the North Atlantic in the distant past, and there’s a possibility that, owing to climate change, the rapidly warming conditions in the Arctic could make them more likely in the future.

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