Plane Seismic Waves
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This Demonstration shows the propagation of elastic waves, commonly known as seismic waves. Two types of seismic waves are shown here: pressure waves (P-waves) and shear waves (S-waves). The P-wave is longitudinal, and so oscillates along the direction of the wave propagation, while the S-wave shakes perpendicular to the travel direction.
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Contributed by: Yu-Sung Chang (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
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In the event of a real earthquake, the P-wave always precedes the S-wave, because the speed of P-waves is
,
while the speed of an S-wave is
,
where is the bulk modulus, μ is the shear modulus, and ρ is the density.
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