prologos why are you telling me things that I have already described accurately in detail?
The Anatomy of a Tsunami
For hundreds or even thousands of years under the Indian Ocean the Indo-Australian tectonic plate had been sliding below the Eurasian plate, however the slide was not smooth. The lower plate snagged the upper one creating a "locked fault zone". Unimaginable pressure built up as the upper plate was dragged down until at 07:58 local time on 26th December 2004 it broke free lifting up billions of tons of water in a few seconds in a magnitude 9 earthquake.
As the wave rose to the surface it was less than a metre high. As it sped towards the coasts of the Pacific Rim at speeds of 800Km/h the waves grew to over 15 metres. Within hours a quarter of a million people were dead and a further two million were homeless...