Horizotal motions push the tsunami

Getting away from silly politics, and back to a quiet diet of fish and geology. And what could combine both better than a new look at tsunamis! (I wrote that mini-article!). Tsunamis are like sloshes in your bathtub, you can make one by bouncing up and down, or you can slosh by sliding forward. According to NASA, the last big one was of the horizontal variety.

All those little arrows show the direction of GPS motions for the big earthquake, and they are predominately horizontal. That might be due to a very shallow-dipping subducting plate. So all the islands went 'woosh' to the West, and sloshed all that water.