Goodbye to all that?   IN 563AD a tsunami devastated Geneva. Two
accounts of the disaster, one by Gregory of Tours and the other
by Marius of Avenches, have survived. What caused the wave, and
the extent of the damage that resulted, have been matters of
conjecture for centuries. But over the past decade several
groups of scientists have pieced together the sequence of events
and one of those groups, led by Katrina Kremer of the University
of Geneva, has now created a computer model of what happened.
Unfortunately for the 1m people who live around the lake’s
shore, the conclusion of this research is that something similar
could easily happen again.  The tsunami of 563 started at the
opposite end of the lake from Geneva, at the point where it is
fed by glacial meltwater carried into it by the Rhône. Both
accounts say the wave began with a massive rockfall on what was
then called Mount Tauredunum (this has led to the tsunami
becoming known as the Tauredunum event). Tauredunum is thought
to be a mountain now call