Do earthquakes travel through oceans?
Clearly EARTHquakes do not. Oceans are made of water; not earth. But the effects of earth moving (quaking) under an ocean can be seen and felt as tsunamis. What happens is this… The earth under the ocean quakes and subsides; That’s the earthquake part. This leaves a kind of huge pothole in the bottom of the ocean. The ocean water rushes in to fill in the pothole. That filling of the pothole results in a wave of receding water that travels at hundreds of mph outward from the epicenter of the quake. When it arrives at a shoreline, the water there recedes exposing once water covered ocean bottom; the beach area becomes greater than normal. This sudden exposure of the ocean bottom is in fact a major signal that whoever is near the water should immediately take to the high ground. [In the Indonesia tsunami, some people actually walked out into the newly revealed ocean floor to pick up shells and stuff. Unfortunately, they were swept out to sea by the next set of waves.] After that initial
