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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally always get Haiti and Papua New Guinea confused in my head. I know they are very different, but for some reason I have to think for a few seconds when someone says Haiti.
>but for some reason Because both islands are divided between 2 states each.
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How can a tsunami cross the Pacific in 10 hours? Isn't that as fast as an airliner? Of course I'm not questioning the maps, but isn't that shocking? How does it work?
It's not a wave that physically moves as a single mass of water across the ocean. It's a shockwave that propagates through the ocean.
"The term wave is often intuitively understood as referring to a transport of spatial disturbances that are generally not accompanied by a motion of the medium occupying this space as a whole,"
For an analogy with (not quite an explanation, as the mechanisms are a bit different) a tsunami's speed, think of what happens when you pluck a guitar string. The back end of the string starts moving up before you even release the string. So, say you lift a string at, say 1cm/s for .1 of a second. (Almost) at the end of that 0.1s, the start of the wave that will form has reached the other end of the string, moving at meters per second (the 'almost' is because the string will deform. Ultimately, relativity has something to say here, too, but that only matters when the resulting wave signal would move near the speed of light)
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Similar situation involving meteorites: "I would sooner believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven!" - Thomas Jefferson The point being, whether we believe it or not changes nothing. This person experienced it.
That's just too smart of a point, I'm afraid I'm all smitten. Though a construction next door or a demolition few blocks down the road would've been a simpler explanation.