What do expectant parents and the Chilean earthquake have in common?

The recent Chilean earthquake was a disaster on a mind-boggling scale; one that had its genesis beneath the sea.  The temblor, and all those in Chile before it, including the biggest ever recorded anywhere, resulted from the Nazca plate sliding down under the South American plate, under the sea to the South West of Santiago.  Well, it doesn't exactly slide, I always imagined it would sound like a creaking door if you could speed up the process a few zillion times.  The upward pressure this collision puts on the South American plate is immense and produces the longest mountain range in the world, the Andes.

Anyway, this most recent slip, which shifted about 10 meters and registered 8.8 on the Richter scale, caused a small tsunami.  Now some researchers from Scripps and UCSD want to know whether it was because of the sea floor movement itself, or because the quake triggered undersea landslides ("slumping") that produced the wave.  They are going to do some nifty multi-beam sonar work to map the seafloor changes in unprecedented details.  Sonar technology has become a really cool tool these days; the same sorts of benefits that new parents reap when they ultrasound their new bundle of joy also give scientists a fantastic new view on the sea floor.  Just check out this example of a shipwreck revealed by NOAA's nautical survey side-scan sonar.