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An earthquake is caused by a sudden slip on a fault. Tectonic plates are always slowly moving, but they can get stuck at their edges due to friction.When the stress on the edge of a tectonic plate overcomes the friction, there is an earthquake that releases energy in waves that travel through the Earth's crust and cause the shaking that is felt.
These waves can travel through any type of material, including fluids, and can travel nearly 1.7 times faster than the S waves. In air, they take the form of sound waves, hence they travel at the speed of sound. Typical speeds are 330 m/s in air, 1450 m/s in water and about 5000 m/s in granite.
A P wave (primary wave or pressure wave) is one of the two main types of elastic body waves, called seismic waves in seismology. P waves travel faster than other seismic waves and hence are the first signal from an earthquake to arrive at any affected location or at a seismograph. P waves may be transmitted through gases, liquids, or solids.
[3] [1] S-waves, in contrast, are constrained to solids and reveal information about the Earth's rigidity and internal composition, including the discovery of the outer core's liquid state since they cannot pass through it. [3] The study of these waves' travel times and reflections offers a reconstructive view of the Earth's layered velocity ...
Travel time in seismology means time for the seismic waves to travel from the focus of an earthquake through the crust to a certain seismograph station. [1] Travel-time curve is a graph showing the relationship between the distance from the epicenter to the observation point and the travel time.
Rayleigh waves emanating outward from the epicenter of an earthquake travel along the surface of the earth at about 10 times the speed of sound in air (0.340 km/s), that is ~3 km/s. Due to their higher speed, the P and S waves generated by an earthquake arrive before the surface waves.
Former security doorman Jim Ruble recalls an eerie stillness at the state Capitol moments before the Nisqually earthquake struck in 2001. ‘The air was very still.’ WA native recounts memory of ...
Surface waves are seismic waves that travel at the surface of the earth, along the air/earth boundary. [3] Surface waves are slower than P-waves(compressional waves) and S-waves(transverse waves). Surface waves are classified into two basic types, Rayleigh waves and Love waves. Rayleigh waves travel in a longitudinal manner (the wave motion is ...