The discovery of the worm threat off La Palma transformed an obscure geological concern into a concrete emergency. When Victor 6000 found hydrate deposits on the island’s submerged volcanic slope and colonies of worms above them, Stanley Frost connected their activity to a wider danger: an already fissured flank of Cumbre Vieja could be destabilised further, potentially releasing a catastrophic wave into the Atlantic. The event matters not only because it identifies a new site of worm activity, but because it joins biological change, geological vulnerability and the limits of prediction in a single unfolding crisis.

The hidden deposits and the expedition

The threat emerged from a gap in existing knowledge. The Canary Islands rise steeply from the seabed, and conventional charts did not show methane deposits there. Frost believed that this apparent absence reflected where researchers had looked: hydrates might run in thin veins through volcanic rock and collect on sediment-covered terraces, rather than lie in large, obvious deposits on the seabed. He had studied volcano formation, not hydrates, so he enlisted Gerhard Bohrmann to assess the possibility and help investigate it.

Frost’s concerns extended beyond La Palma. He identified the island, Hawaii, Cape Verde, Tristan da Cunha and Réunion as possible sites of danger, but regarded La Palma as the most threatening. With Bohrmann’s help, his team obtained the research vessel Polarstern for an expedition. The ship carried a Victor 6000, a remotely operated vehicle that could work at depths of up to six thousand metres; its movements and returning data could be managed from the vessel through a connecting cable. Underwater cameras were also fitted to help detect mussels, jellyfish or other invading organisms. The equipment did not remove the uncertainty of deep-sea work, but gave the team a way to search the steep volcanic face directly.

Off La Palma’s western coast, Victor descended within sight of shore and searched the slope systematically. At four hundred metres, the vehicle encountered overlapping terraces jutting from the rock and covered in sediment. The deposits Frost had predicted were there. Worms were present on them as well. The evidence joined two observations that had previously been conjectural: methane hydrates existed on the submerged volcanic terraces, and colonies of worms were active at those deposits.

A volcanic flank already under strain

Frost interpreted the finding against the island’s geological history. In 1949, an eruption at the San Juan volcano had opened a fault running for kilometres along La Palma’s western flank. At the time, part of the Cumbre Vieja ridge had slipped four metres towards the ocean. Frost had monitored the region for years and believed that the rock within La Palma might be fissured. He also pointed to the unusually large amount of groundwater trapped in the rock: when hot magma next entered a volcanic vent, he argued, the water could expand and evaporate rapidly, generating pressure against the flank.

In his assessment, the western side was already destabilised, while the eastern and southern flanks pressed against it. A future eruption could precipitate a major failure, but Frost did not consider an eruption the only possible trigger. He believed the worms were working on a submarine landslide, a smaller version of the process associated with the earlier devastation in Europe. The resulting movement could cause an earthquake, further destabilise the ridge and perhaps help trigger an eruption. His conclusion was that the western flank would eventually detach; the unknown was when. The authorities on La Palma, as relayed by De Beers representative Jan van Maarten, regarded the theory as dubious, underscoring the divide between Frost’s warning and the degree of certainty others were willing to accept.

From slope failure to Atlantic wave

Bohrmann explained the potential consequences of a large collapse. If a vast mass of rock entered the sea, it would displace an immense volume of water. In the team’s estimate, the debris could travel sixty kilometres across the seabed, obstructing water flowing back over the slide and creating an air cavity that would displace still more. The resulting wave could stand between six hundred and nine hundred metres high near La Palma and travel across the Atlantic at about a thousand kilometres per hour. As it moved away from its source, its energy would spread and the wave would flatten, but that attenuation did not make the threat harmless.

Frost stressed the difference between height at the source and danger at a distant coast. He argued that a wave fifty metres high would be enough to flatten New York, and that its impact would deliver more energy than the United States used in a year. The force, he warned, would strike buildings at their bases, so height alone would not ensure their survival. These figures were estimates offered as part of a warning, not a prediction that such a wave had already formed or that its arrival could be dated. The meeting established the scale of the possible disaster while leaving its timing unresolved.

Preparing an intervention

The discovery also prompted discussion of how to respond to the worms. Frost’s group was joined on La Palma by Bohrmann and two De Beers representatives: an executive and technology specialist Jan van Maarten. Their conversation turned from assessing the danger to the practical requirements of a deep-sea operation. A proposed pipe, potentially four or five hundred metres long, would be too heavy and unwieldy for an ordinary vessel to carry and operate safely. A dredge would not be large enough, and a drillship did not appear suitable.

The proposed alternative was a mobile semi-submersible platform, stable enough to support the boom and pipe while still manoeuvring across the water. The design discussion included adapting an existing semi-submersible in Namibia, equipped with two propellers driven by six-thousand-horsepower engines and potentially supplemented with additional thrusters. The timetable showed how urgent and difficult the effort would be: work that would normally take six months might, if begun immediately, be completed in six to eight weeks, though even that was described as uncertain. The platform was a proposed means of mounting an operation, not evidence that the worms had already been removed.

Significance and uncertainty

La Palma extends the novel’s pattern of linking biological anomalies to vulnerabilities in the physical world. Here the worms are not simply a strange discovery: their presence on hydrate deposits gives Frost reason to fear that they are contributing to slope failure, while the island’s volcanic structure supplies a possible path from local seabed activity to a disaster across the Atlantic. The causal chain remains a warning about what may happen, rather than a fully timed forecast, but each link changes the meaning of the next: the deposits make the worms’ location consequential, and the old fault makes their activity newly urgent.

The scene also places competing forms of knowledge side by side. Frost brings long-term geological monitoring and a theory of the flank’s instability; Bohrmann translates that danger into estimates of wave behaviour; the expedition’s remotely operated vehicle provides evidence from a depth inaccessible to direct observation; and the proposed platform turns scientific concern into an engineering problem. Yet neither the discovery nor the calculations resolve the central uncertainty. The threat is legible enough to demand action, while the moment of collapse remains impossible to specify.