TRANSCRIPT

The shifting rock in an earthquake causes vibrations called seismic waves

that travel within Earth or along its surface.

Scientists use an instrument called a seismograph to record data about

seismic waves. This information yields information that can help scientists
learn not only about earthquake behavior but also about the structure of
Earth itself.

There are two broad classes of seismic waves: body waves and surface
waves. Body waves travel within the body of Earth. They include P, or
primary, waves and S, or secondary, waves.

P waves cause the ground to compress and expand, that is, to move back
and forth, in the direction of travel. They are called primary waves because
they are the first type of wave to arrive at seismic recording stations. P
waves can travel through solids, liquids, and even gases.

S waves shake the ground in a shearing, or crosswise, motion that is

perpendicular to the direction of travel.

These are the shake waves that move the ground up and down or from side
to side. S waves are called secondary waves because they always arrive after
P waves at seismic recording stations. Unlike P waves, S waves can travel
only through solid materials.

After both P and S waves have moved through the body of Earth, they are
followed by surface waves, which travel along Earth’s surface. Surface
waves travel only through solid media. They are slower-moving than body
waves but are much larger and therefore more destructive.

The two types of surface waves are named Love waves and Rayleigh waves,
after the scientists who identified them.

Love waves have a horizontal motion that moves the surface from side to
side perpendicular to the direction the wave is traveling. Of the two surface
waves, Love waves move faster.

Rayleigh waves cause the ground to shake in an elliptical pattern. This

motion is similar to that observed in ocean waves. Of all the seismic waves,
Rayleigh waves spread out the most, giving them a long duration on
seismograph recordings.
 0:00What I want to do in this video is talk a little bit
 0:02about seismic waves.
 0:06One, because they're interesting by themselves,
 0:09but they're also really useful for figuring out
 0:11what the actual composition of the Earth is.
 0:13You've seen my video on the actual layers of
the Earth,
 0:17and seismic waves are crucial to actually
realizing
 0:20how people figured out what the different layers
of the Earth
 0:24are.
 0:24And just to be clear, seismic waves,
 0:26they're normally associated with earthquakes,
 0:28but they're any waves that travel through the
Earth.
 0:32They could be due to an earthquake, or just
 0:37really any kind of a large explosion, or anything
 0:41that really essentially starts sending energy
 0:44through the rock on Earth, really through Earth
itself.
 0:48Now, there's two fundamentally different types
 0:51of the seismic waves.
 0:54And we're going to focus on one more than the
other.
 0:56One is surface waves.
 1:00And the other is body waves.
 1:03Now, surface waves are ones that literally
 1:05travel across the surface of something.
 1:07In this case, we're talking about the surface
 1:08of the ground.
 1:09And this right here is a depiction of surface
waves.
 1:12And these really are more analogous to the type
 1:14of waves we normally associate with the surface
of water.
 1:18And there's two types of surface waves, rally
waves,
 1:21and love waves.
 1:21We won't go into a lot of detail,
 1:23but you can see that rally waves are
 1:24kind of the ground moving up and down.
 1:26Right here the ground is moving up.
 1:27Here it's moving down.
 1:29Here it's moving up.
 1:30Here it's moving down.
 1:31So you can kind of view it as kind of a ground
roll.
 1:34The love waves are essentially the ground
 1:37shifting left and right.
 1:39So here it's not moving up and down,
 1:40but here it's moving, if you're facing
 1:43the direction of the wave movement, to the left
here.
 1:46Here it's moving to the right.
 1:47Here it's moving to the left.
 1:49Here it's moving to the right.
 1:50In both cases, the movement of the surface
wave
 1:53is perpendicular to the direction of motion.
 1:56So we sometimes call these transverse waves.
 1:58And these are essentially analogous to,
 2:00as I said, kind of what we see in water waves.
 2:02Now, the more interesting thing are the body
waves,
 2:05because the body waves, first of all, they're
 2:07the fastest moving waves.
 2:09And these are also the waves that
 2:10are used to figure out the structure of the Earth.
 2:13So the body ways come in two varieties.
 2:16You have your P-waves, or Primary waves.
 •Current transcript segment:2:22And you have your
S-waves, or Secondary waves.
 2:27And they're depicted right over here.
 2:29And this is actually energy that's
 2:32being transferred through a body.
 2:34So it's not just moving along the surface of one.
 2:37And so here in this diagram that I
 2:39got from Wikipedia, which I think Wikipedia got
from the US
 2:42Geological Survey, we have a hammer being hit
on some rock
 2:46or whatever.
 2:47And what you see is right when the hammer
gets
 2:49hit at this end of the rock, and I can zoom in a
little bit--
 2:52so let's say I have this rock over here
 2:55and I hit it right over here with a hammer or
something.
 2:59What that's immediately going to do
 3:01is it's going to compress the rock that the
hammer comes
 3:04in touch with.
 3:05It's going to compress that rock.
 3:07But then that energy, essentially the molecules
 3:10are going to bump into the adjacent molecules.
 3:13And then those adjacent molecules
 3:14are then going to bump into the molecules right
next to it,
 3:17and then they're going to bump into the
molecules
 3:18right next to it.
 3:19So you're going to have this kind of compressed
part of rock
 3:22moving through the wave.
 3:23So these are compressed, and those molecules
 3:25are going to go bump into the adjacent
molecules.
 3:28So kind of immediately after that the rock will be
 3:31denser right over here.
 3:34The first things that were bumped,
 3:35those will essentially bump into the ones right
above them,
 3:38and then they will kind of move back to where
they were.
 3:40And so now the compression will have moved,
and if you fast
 3:42forward it will have moved a little bit forward.
 3:44So you essentially have this compression wave.
 3:46You hit the hammer here, and you essentially
 3:48have a changing density that is moving
 3:51in the same direction of the wave.
 3:53In this situation that is the direction of the wave,
 4:00and you see that the molecules are
 4:01kind of going back and forth along that same
axis.
 4:04They're going along the same direction as the
wave.
 4:07So those are P-waves.
 4:10And P waves can travel through air.
 4:15Essentially sound waves are compression
waves.
 4:17They can travel through liquid.
 4:21And they can obviously travel through solids.
 4:24And, depending, in air they'll travel the slowest.
 4:27They'll essentially essentially, move
 4:29at the speed of sound, 330 metres per second,
which
 4:31isn't really slow by every day human standards.
 4:34In a liquid they'll move about 1,500 meters per
second.
 4:37And then in granite, which is most
 4:39of the crustal material of the Earth,
 4:42they'll move at around 5,000 meters per second.
 4:45Let me write that down.
 4:46So 5,000 meters per second, or essentially
 4:485 kilometers per second if they're moving
through granite.
 4:53Now, S-waves are essentially-- if you
 4:57were to hit a hammer on the side of this rock--
 4:59so let me draw another diagram since this is
pretty small.
 5:04If you were to hit a hammer right over here what
 5:07it would do is it would temporarily kind of
 5:09push all the rock over here.
 5:11It would deform it a little bit, and that
 5:13would pull a little bit of the rock back with it.
 5:15And then this rock that's right above it would
slowly
 5:18be pulled down, while this rock that was initially
hit
 5:20will be moved back up.
 5:21So you fast forward maybe a millisecond, and
now
 5:24the next layer of rock right above
 5:26that will be kind of deformed to the right.
 5:35And if you keep fast forwarding it
 5:37the deformation will move upwards.
 5:39And notice, over here, once again, the
movement of the wave
 5:44is upwards.
 5:46But now the movement of the material
 5:48is not going along the same axis that we saw
with the P-waves,
 5:51or the compression waves.
 5:52It's now moving perpendicular.
 5:54It's now moving along a perpendicular axis,
 5:58or you could call this a transverse wave.
 6:00The movement of the particles is now
 6:02on a perpendicular axis to the actual movement
of the waves.
 6:06And so that's what an S-wave is.
 6:08And they move a little bit slower than the P-
waves.
 6:10So if an earthquake that were to happen you'd
 6:12see the P-waves first.
 6:14And then at about 60% of the speed of the P-
waves
 6:17you would see the S-waves.
 6:19Now, the most important thing to think about,
especially
 6:22from the point of view of figuring out
 6:23the composition of the Earth, is that the S-
waves can only
 6:29travel through solid.
 6:34And you might say, wait, I've seen transverse
waves
 6:36on water that look like this.
 6:38But remember, that is a surface wave.
 6:39We are talking about body waves.
 6:41We're talking about things that are actually
 6:43going through the body of water.
 6:44And one way to think about this is
 6:46if I had some water over here-- so let's say
 6:50that this is a pool.
 6:51I'll draw a cross section of water.
 6:56I could have drawn it better than that.
 6:59If I have a cross section of water right over here,
 7:04let's think about it, and hopefully it'll
 7:06make intuitive sense to you.
 7:08If I were to compress some of the water, if I
were to kind
 7:11of slam some part of the water here with like a
big,
 7:13I don't know, some type of-- I would just
 7:15compress it really fast.
 7:17A P-wave could transmit, because those water
molecules would
 7:21bump into the water molecules next to it, which
 7:23would bump into the water molecules next to
that.
 7:25And so you would have a compression wave, or
a P-wave,
 7:27moving in the direction of my bump.
 7:29So P-waves waves it makes sense, and the
same thing
 7:31is true with air or sound waves, that it make
sense
 7:34that it could travel through a liquid.
 7:38And remember, we're under the water.
 7:40We're not thinking about the surface.
 7:41We're thinking about moving through the body
of the water.
 7:43Let's say that you were to kind of take
 7:46that hammer and kind of slapped the side of this
little volume
 7:52of water here.
 7:52Well, essentially all that would do
 7:54is it would send a compression wave in that
direction.
 7:58It really wouldn't do anything.
 8:00It wouldn't allow a transverse wave to go that
way,
 8:04because the water doesn't have this elastic
property where
 8:13if something bounces that way it's
 8:14going to immediately bounce back that way.
 8:16It's being pulled back like a solid would.
 8:19So S-waves only travel through solids.
 8:25So we're going to use essentially
 8:26our understanding of P-waves, which travel
through air,
 8:29liquid, or solid, and our understanding of S-
waves
 8:31to essentially figure out what the composition of
Earth is.