Antilles

The Antilles appear as one of the regions exposed to a catastrophic tsunami in a forecast of the effects of a possible eruption at Cumbre Vieja. Their significance in the novel is geographic and anticipatory: the projected wave links a volcanic emergency in the Canary Islands to danger across the Caribbean and the Atlantic-facing Americas.

Place in the projected disaster

The forecast places the Antilles in the Caribbean’s path after the initial eruption and the devastation of the Canary Islands. It predicts that, six to eight hours after the eruption, a wave about fifty metres high would cross the Caribbean and lay waste to the islands. The Antilles are thus presented not as the site of an observed disaster, but as a region facing a projected one.

Scale and significance

The islands form part of a wider chain of predicted consequences. The same scenario forecasts flooding along the eastern coast of the United States, from New York to Miami, followed soon afterward by a wave reaching Brazil with similar force; smaller waves would extend as far as Spain, Portugal, and the British Isles. By placing the Antilles within this transoceanic sequence, the novel makes the threatened region a measure of how a local volcanic event could become a disaster spanning multiple coasts.