By Glenn Farley, King 5 News

Scientists in Washington see a troubling comparison between the deadly tsunami in Indonesia to Puget Sound and local lakes.

New animation produced by the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle is giving us our first scientific look at the tsunami that has ravaged parts of Indonesia.

The animation, which is an original version based on the available facts, shows energy trapped inside of a long fjord-like bay, ricocheting off the east and west shorelines, with the City of Palu at the south end.

The height of the tallest tsunami wave is estimated at 6 meters, or about 20 feet, which devastated parts of the city, leaving ships marooned on shore. The tsunami was triggered by a magnitude 7.5 earthquake and caused more than 1,500 deaths, a toll that may continue to rise.

The animation was produced by Vasily Titov, who is the lead scientist for tsunami research for PMEL, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

He says his computer model was greatly aided by video taken from the cockpit of an airliner which took off as the earthquake started. The plane is flying over the bay, and the video shows water lifting up in places along the shoreline like a hump or a hill.

Inside the raised water, you can see white water churning, suggesting the shaking triggered underwater landslides, known to have caused tsunamis in the past. It’s the first time he believes the birth of a tsunami has ever been caught on camera.

What has the attention of Titov and other tsunami experts, is the tsunami is associated with a type of earthquake that doesn’t usually trigger large waves. Classic coastal tsunamis killed 15,000 in northeastern Japan in 2011, and the worst in recent history killed 250,000 people in 2004 around the Indian Ocean, including Indonesia.

These classic coastal tsunamis are caused by faults where one side of the fault is offset vertically from the other. Typically one side is lifted up or dips down, shifting the bottom of the ocean and driving energy into the water above. In the Palu earthquake, evidence is that the fault didn’t do that, but slipped side-to-side, which usually doesn’t trigger a tsunami. So what happened?