Considerable work has been done in seismology to explain the characteristics of the recorded ground motions in earthquakes. Such knowledge is needed to predict ground motions in future earthquakes so that earthquake-resistant structures can be designed. Although earthquakes cause death and destruction through such secondary effects as landslides, tsunamis, fires, and fault rupture, the greatest losses—both of lives and of property—result from the collapse of man-made structures during the violent shaking of the ground. Accordingly, the most effective way to mitigate the damage of earthquakes from an engineering standpoint is to design and construct structures capable of withstanding strong ground motions.

Interpreting recorded ground motions

Most elastic waves recorded close to an extended fault source are complicated and difficult to interpret uniquely. Understanding such near-source motion can be viewed as a three-part problem. The first part stems from the generation of elastic waves by the slipping fault as the moving rupture sweeps out an area of slip along the fault plane within a given time. The pattern of waves produced is dependent on several parameters, such as fault dimension and rupture velocity. Elastic waves of various types radiate from the vicinity of the moving rupture in all directions. The geometry and frictional properties of the fault critically affect the pattern of radiation from it.

The second part of the problem concerns the passage of the waves through the intervening rocks to the site and the effect of geologic conditions. The third part involves the conditions at the recording site itself, such as topography and highly attenuating soils. All these questions must be considered when estimating likely earthquake effects at a site of any proposed structure.

Experience has shown that the ground strong-motion recordings have a variable pattern in detail but predictable regular shapes in general (except in the case of strong multiple earthquakes). An example of actual shaking of the ground (acceleration, velocity, and displacement) recorded during an earthquake is given in the . In a strong horizontal shaking of the ground near the fault source, there is an initial segment of motion made up mainly of P waves, which frequently manifest themselves strongly in the vertical motion. This is followed by the onset of S waves, often associated with a longer-period pulse of ground velocity and displacement related to the near-site fault slip or fling. This pulse is often enhanced in the direction of the fault rupture and normal to it. After the S onset there is shaking that consists of a mixture of S and P waves, but the S motions become dominant as the duration increases. Later, in the horizontal component, surface waves dominate, mixed with some S body waves. Depending on the distance of the site from the fault and the structure of the intervening rocks and soils, surface waves are spread out into long trains.

Developing resistant structures

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Developing engineered structural designs that are able to resist the forces generated by seismic waves can be achieved either by following building codes based on hazard maps or by appropriate methods of analysis. Many countries reserve theoretical structural analyses for the larger, more costly, or critical buildings to be constructed in the most seismically active regions, while simply requiring that ordinary structures conform to local building codes. Economic realities usually determine the goal, not of preventing all damage in all earthquakes but of minimizing damage in moderate, more common earthquakes and ensuring no major collapse at the strongest intensities. An essential part of what goes into engineering decisions on design and into the development and revision of earthquake-resistant design codes is therefore seismological, involving measurement of strong seismic waves, field studies of intensity and damage, and the probability of earthquake occurrence.

Earthquake risk can also be reduced by rapid post-earthquake response. Strong-motion accelerographs have been connected in some urban areas, such as Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Mexico City, to interactive computers. The recorded waves are correlated with seismic intensity scales and rapidly displayed graphically on regional maps via the World Wide Web.

Seismological tomography

Seismological data on the Earth’s deep structure come from several sources. These include P and S waves in earthquakes and nuclear explosions, the dispersion of surface waves from distant earthquakes, and vibrations of the whole Earth from large earthquakes.

One of the major aims of seismology is to infer the minimum set of properties of the Earth’s interior that will explain recorded seismic wave trains in detail. Notwithstanding the tremendous progress made in the exploration of the Earth’s deep structure during the first half of the 20th century, realization of this goal was severely limited until the 1960s because of the laborious effort required to evaluate theoretical models and to process the large amounts of earthquake data recorded. The application of high-speed computers with their enormous storage and rapid retrieval capabilities opened the way for major advances in both theoretical work and data handling.

Since the mid-1970s, researchers have studied realistic models of the Earth’s structure that include continental and oceanic boundaries, mountains, and river valleys rather than simple structures such as those involving variation only with depth. In addition, various technical developments have benefited observational seismology. For example, the implications of seismic exploratory techniques developed by the petroleum industry (such as seismic reflection) have been recognized and the procedures adopted. Equally significant has been the application of three-dimensional imaging methods to the exploration of the Earth’s deep structure. This has been made possible by the development of very fast microprocessors and computers with peripheral display equipment.

The major method for determining the structure of the Earth’s deep interior is the detailed analysis of seismograms of seismic waves. (Such earthquake readings also provide estimates of wave velocities, density, and elastic and inelastic parameters in the Earth.) The primary procedure is to measure the travel times of various wave types, such as P and S, from their source to the recording seismograph. First, however, identification of each wave type with its ray path through the Earth must be made.

Seismic rays for many paths of P and S waves leaving the earthquake focus F are shown in the figure. Rays corresponding to waves that have been reflected at the Earth’s outer surface (or possibly at one of the interior discontinuity surfaces) are denoted as PP, PS, SP, PSS, and so on. For example, PS corresponds to a wave that is of P type before surface reflection and of S type afterward. In addition, there are rays such as pPP, sPP, and sPS, the symbols p and s corresponding to an initial ascent to the outer surface as P or S waves, respectively, from a deep focus.

An especially important class of rays is associated with a discontinuity surface separating the central core of the Earth from the mantle at a depth of about 2,900 km (1,800 miles) below the outer surface. The symbol c is used to indicate an upward reflection at this discontinuity. Thus, if a P wave travels down from a focus to the discontinuity surface in question, the upward reflection into an S wave is recorded at an observing station as the ray PcS and similarly with PcP, ScS, and ScP. The symbol K is used to denote the part (of P type) of the path of a wave that passes through the liquid central core. Thus, the ray SKS corresponds to a wave that starts as an S wave, is refracted into the central core as a P wave, and is refracted back into the mantle, wherein it finally emerges as an S wave. Such rays as SKKS correspond to waves that have suffered an internal reflection at the boundary of the central core.

The discovery of the existence of an inner core in 1936 by the Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann made it necessary to introduce additional basic symbols. For paths of waves inside the central core, the symbols i and I are used analogously to c and K for the whole Earth; therefore, i indicates reflection upward at the boundary between the outer and inner portions of the central core, and I corresponds to the part (of P type) of the path of a wave that lies inside the inner portion. Thus, for instance, discrimination needs to be made between the rays PKP, PKiKP, and PKIKP. The first of these corresponds to a wave that has entered the outer part of the central core but has not reached the inner core, the second to one that has been reflected upward at the inner core boundary, and the third to one that has penetrated into the inner portion.

By combining the symbols p, s, P, S, c, K, i, and I in various ways, notation is developed for all the main rays associated with body earthquake waves. The symbol J has been introduced to correspond to S waves in the inner core, should evidence ever be found for such waves.

Finally, the use of times of travel along rays to infer hidden structure is analogous to the use of X-rays in medical tomography. The method involves reconstructing an image of internal anomalies from measurements made at the outer surface. Nowadays, hundreds of thousands of travel times of P and S waves are available in earthquake catalogs for the tomographic imaging of the Earth’s interior and the mapping of internal structure.

Structure of the Earth’s interior

Studies with earthquake recordings have given a picture inside the Earth of a solid but layered and flow-patterned mantle about 2,900 km (1,800 miles) thick, which in places lies within 10 km (6 miles) of the surface under the oceans.

The thin surface rock layer surrounding the mantle is the crust, whose lower boundary is called the Mohorovičić discontinuity. In normal continental regions the crust is about 30 to 40 km thick; there is usually a superficial low-velocity sedimentary layer underlain by a zone in which seismic velocity increases with depth. Beneath this zone there is a layer in which P-wave velocities in some places fall from 6 to 5.6 km per second. The middle part of the crust is characterized by a heterogeneous zone with P velocities of nearly 6 to 6.3 km per second. The lowest layer of the crust (about 10 km thick) has significantly higher P velocities, ranging up to nearly 7 km per second.

In the deep ocean there is a sedimentary layer that is about 1 km thick. Underneath is the lower layer of the oceanic crust, which is about 4 km thick. This layer is inferred to consist of basalt that formed where extrusions of basaltic magma at oceanic ridges have been added to the upper part of lithospheric plates as they spread away from the ridge crests. This crustal layer cools as it moves away from the ridge crest, and its seismic velocities increase correspondingly.

Below the mantle lies a shell that is 2,255 km thick, which seismic waves show to have the properties of a liquid. At the very centre of the planet is a separate solid core with a radius of 1,216 km. Recent work with observed seismic waves has revealed three-dimensional structural details inside the Earth, especially in the crust and lithosphere, under the subduction zones, at the base of the mantle, and in the inner core. These regional variations are important in explaining the dynamic history of the planet.

Long-period oscillations of the globe

Sometimes earthquakes are large enough to cause the whole Earth to ring like a bell. The deepest tone of vibration of the planet is one with a period (the length of time between the arrival of successive crests in a wave train) of 54 minutes. Knowledge of these vibrations has come from a remarkable extension in the range of periods of ground movements that can be recorded by modern digital long-period seismographs that span the entire allowable spectrum of earthquake wave periods: from ordinary P waves with periods of tenths of seconds to vibrations with periods on the order of 12 and 24 hours such as those that occur in Earth tidal movements.

The measurements of vibrations of the whole Earth provide important information on the properties of the interior of the planet. It should be emphasized that these free vibrations are set up by the energy release of the earthquake source but continue for many hours and sometimes even days. For an elastic sphere such as the Earth, two types of vibrations are known to be possible. In one type, called S modes, or spheroidal vibrations, the motions of the elements of the sphere have components along the radius as well as along the tangent. In the second type, which are designated as T modes, or torsional vibrations, there is shear but no radial displacements. The nomenclature is _nS_l and _nT_l, where the letters n and l are related to the surfaces in the vibration at which there is zero motion. Four examples are illustrated in the figure. The subscript n gives a count of the number of internal zero-motion (nodal) surfaces, and l indicates the number of surface nodal lines.

Several hundred types of S and T vibrations have been identified and the associated periods measured. The amplitudes of the ground motion in the vibrations have been determined for particular earthquakes, and, more important, the attenuation of each component vibration has been measured. The dimensionless measure of this decay constant is called the quality factor Q. The greater the value of Q, the less the wave or vibration damping. Typically, for _oS₁₀ and _oT₁₀, the Q values are about 250.

The rate of decay of the vibrations of the whole Earth with the passage of time can be seen in the figure, where they appear superimposed for 20 hours of the 12-hour tidal deformations of the Earth. At the bottom of the figure these vibrations have been split up into a series of peaks, each with a definite frequency, similar to that of the spectrum of light. Such a spectrum indicates the relative amplitude of each harmonic present in the free oscillations. If the physical properties of the Earth’s interior were known, all these individual peaks could be calculated directly. Instead, the internal structure must be estimated from the observed peaks.

Recent research has shown that observations of long-period oscillations of the Earth discriminate fairly finely between different Earth models. In applying the observations to improve the resolution and precision of such representations of the planet’s internal structure, a considerable number of Earth models are set up, and all the periods of their free oscillations are computed and checked against the observations. Models can then be successively eliminated until only a small range remains. In practice, the work starts with existing models; efforts are made to amend them by sequential steps until full compatibility with the observations is achieved, within the uncertainties of the observations. Even so, the resulting computed Earth structure is not a unique solution to the problem.