Anyone familiar with standard wave mechanics will expect that crossing waves will pass right through each other. The part that confuses me is why the waves don't spread out laterally. For instance, take the waves in the article that went from the Indian ocean to the Mexican coast. Wouldn't they fan out across the entirety of the Pacific ocean after passing between Australia and Antarctica? Or maybe they do, but they're so big to begin with that even after they do so, they're still big enough to crash on the entire west coast of the Americas? Would the same storm have caused gigantic waves to crash on the much closer southern Australian shore?
"Water waves are an example of waves that involve a combination of both longitudinal and transverse motions. As a wave travels through the waver, the particles travel in clockwise circles. The radius of the circles decreases as the depth into the water increases."
That's a cool animation, and I've seen it before, but I'm talking about the waves spreading out in the 3rd dimension, horizontally along the length of the wave (i.e. perpendicular to the screen in that animation).
You mean like ripples in a pond? Yes, that does happen for both deep and shallow water waves. And yes, the wave power would be expected to spread laterally, causing the amplitudes observed at a point to be smaller further from the source.
Here's a model visualization of the tsunami set off by the 2004 Sumatran earthquake.
http://youtu.be/46ovp1rZeL4
