Reply #68: Some details...

[mcscajun]

Excerpt from the L.A. Times story (emphasis mine):

Quake shifts isle 100 feet, giving rise to fatal tsunami

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

The magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck off Indonesia on Sunday morning moved the entire island of Sumatra about 100 feet toward the southwest, pushing up a gigantic mass of water that quickly collapsed into a tsunami that devastated shorelines around the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

The quake was one of the largest ever recorded by scientists. It was the first tsunami in the Indian Ocean since 1883, according to Costas Synolakis, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Sunday's earthquake, which occurred in an active geological region, ruptured an estimated 600-mile-long stretch of the Earth beneath the Indian Ocean. The quake caused one side of the fault to slide past the other much as seismologists expect the San Andreas Fault to do when the "big one" hits California.