Snapshot of simulated tsunami waves

Snapshot of simulated tsunami waves approximately 7 minutes after they were triggered by the September 29 earthquake. View northwestward. To make subtle features easily visible, vertical scales of seafloor and waves are exaggerated with respect to horizontal scale; thus waves and seafloor features look much steeper than they really are. Scale of waves is also exaggerated with respect to topography; for reference, the height of the waves in this view is about 3.5 m. Depth of Tonga trench is about 7,000 m. Excerpted from a computer animation posted at Preliminary Analysis of the September 29, 2009, Samoa Tsunami, Southwest Pacific Ocean.