Tsunami Movie of Ocean Floor - Damage Is Tied to Ocean Floor (washingtonpost.com)

Tsunami Movie of Ocean Floor - Damage Is Tied to Ocean Floor (washingtonpost.com):

Damage Is Tied to Ocean Floor
Tsunami Hit Hardest in Areas East, West of Quake Epicenter
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 7, 2005; Page A14

"Last month's disparities started when a plate of Earth's crust slipped abruptly beneath an adjoining slab of rock under the seas just west of Sumatra. Unlike an asteroid impact, which would send out concentric circles of energy in all directions equally, this geologic event was primarily a sideways motion. That meant that from the start, the waves it sent east and west carried much more energy than those headed north or south, said Steven Ward, a geophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who has generated a detailed computer model of the tsunami's progression (visible at www.es.ucsc.edu/~ward/indo.mov). "