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On the propagation of acoustic–gravity waves due to a slender rupture in an elastic seabed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Byron Williams
Affiliation:
School of Mathematics, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF24 4AG, UK
Usama Kadri*
Affiliation:
School of Mathematics, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF24 4AG, UK
*
Email address for correspondence: kadriu@cardiff.ac.uk

Abstract

The propagation of waves from a vertical uplift of a slender rectangular fault in a sea of constant depth is discussed, accounting for water compressibility, gravity and seabed elasticity. The compressed water column results in the generation of acoustic–gravity waves that travel at the speed of sound in water. Acoustic–gravity waves are found to terminate after a finite time, with the decay time most influenced by seabed rigidity, which is in contrast to the rigid stationary-phase model where signals persist indefinitely. At certain frequencies acoustic–gravity waves couple with the elastic seabed and travel at the shear velocity (speed of sound in an elastic solid). Improved estimates of the critical frequencies are derived. Moreover, besides the usual tsunami, a second – very small amplitude – surface wave mode travelling at the speed of sound arises under certain frequencies. We derive the cut-off frequency for this mode. The acoustic modes possess a frequency spectrum which depends on the time evolution and spatial properties of the rupture. We find that appropriate filtering of the acoustic–gravity wave signal can reveal characteristic peaks that encode information on the fault's geometry and dynamics.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. Representation of the flow domain. (a) Cross-section through the $x, z$ plane. Water depth is $h$, surface elevation is $\eta (x,y,t)$, liquid velocity potential is $\phi _{l}$, solid dilation potential is $\phi _{s}$ and solid rotation potential is $\boldsymbol {\varPsi }$. Densities in the liquid and solid medium are $\rho _{l}$ and $\rho _{s}$ respectively. (b) Top view of slender fault.

Figure 1

Figure 2. Zones possible according to $r, q, s$ being real or imaginary for the case $\omega = 2{\rm \pi}, C_{l}=1450\ {\rm m s}^{-1}, C_{s}=3550\ {\rm m s}^{-1}, C_{p}=6300\ {\rm m s}^{-1}$. Zone 1 (orange) has $r,q,s\in \mathbb {R}$ and corresponds to surface–gravity waves. Zone 2 (green) has $r \in \textrm {i}\mathbb {R}, {\rm with}\ q, s \in \mathbb {R}$ and corresponds to acoustic–gravity waves. The remaining zones near $k=0$ (grey) are not physical solutions. The points where $r,s,q$ transition real $\rightleftharpoons$ imaginary are designated $\pm k_{r}=\pm 0.00433$ (black circles), $\pm k_{s}=\pm 0.00177$ (red circles) and $\pm k_{q}=\pm 0.00099$ (blue circles) respectively.

Figure 2

Figure 3. Acoustic–gravity wave solutions to the dispersion relation are located at the intersections of dashed and solid curves (blue diamonds) for $\omega =2{\rm \pi}$ and depth $h=4000$ m. Dashed curve is left-hand side (LHS) of (3.44) and solid curve is right-hand side (RHS) of (3.44) when $r\in \textrm {i}\mathbb {R}$.

Figure 3

Figure 4. Plot of ${1}/{|H_{2}|}$ in the complex plane when $H_{2}=H_{2}(k)$ and $k$ is allowed to take on complex values. The angular frequency in this case is $\omega =2{\rm \pi}$ as in figure 3.

Figure 4

Figure 5. (a) Cross-section of figure 4 through the real axis showing locations of the poles when $\omega =2{\rm \pi}$. (b) Cross-section of figure 4 through the imaginary axis showing locations of the zeros when $\omega =2{\rm \pi}$.

Figure 5

Figure 6. Approximate critical values from (4.1) (red circles) and actual critical values (blue circles). (a) Dispersion relation plot for $h=4000$ m. Red circle marks vertical asymptote. Blue circle marks $r_{2}$, the actual cut-off for mode 2. Dashed trace, left-hand side (LHS) of equation (3.44); solid trace, right-hand side (RHS) of equation (3.44). (b) Phase velocity curves for first four modes at constant depth of $h=4000$ m. Dotted line is $C_{s}=3550\ \textrm {m s}^{-1}$.

Figure 6

Figure 7. Percentage error for approximate critical frequencies $\omega _{n}$ from (4.7). Depths range between 500 m (lower error bound) and 8000 m (upper error bound) – all available modes.

Figure 7

Table 1. Comparison of cut-off frequencies obtained from numeric solver ($\omega _{00}$) with approximations from quadratic solution ($\varOmega _{00}$) and coarse approximation ($\mathcal {A}_{00}$) for various depths $h$.

Figure 8

Figure 8. Generating function $\tilde {v}(\tilde {r},n)$ for first acoustic–gravity mode ($n=1$) with depth $h=2000$ m. Other modes are derived by shifting the horizontal axis through $(n-1){\rm \pi}$ and using the appropriate values for $\tilde {r}_{n}$ and $\tilde {r}_{*}$.

Figure 9

Figure 9. The black trace $\tilde {t}$ is sheared by the action of $\tilde {S}$ into each of the coloured curves for each mode. Depth in this case is 2000 m, first eight modes shown. Then the result is translated and scaled to give the final phase velocity curves.

Figure 10

Figure 10. Rigid seabed phase velocity curves along with shearing function. (a) Rigid seabed phase velocity $\tilde {V}_{r}$ versus $\tilde {\omega }$. Depth $h=2000$ m. First eight modes. (b) Plot of shear function $\tilde {S}$ versus $\tilde {a}$. Depth $h=2000$ m. First eight modes.

Figure 11

Figure 11. Overlay of phase velocity curves for depth of $h=4000$ m. Solid black lines are the approximate curves, dashed are those obtained from solving the dispersion relation.

Figure 12

Figure 12. Percentage error for first 16 modes. Depth $h=4000$ m.

Figure 13

Figure 13. First acoustic mode (a) with elastic seabed and (b) with rigid seabed.

Figure 14

Figure 14. Response of signal duration when changing parameters.

Figure 15

Figure 15. Fast Fourier transform of first four available modes. Depth $h= 4000$ m.

Figure 16

Figure 16. Band-pass filtering applied to the 10 combined modes of the synthetic acoustic–gravity wave generated by a single slender fault. (a) The first 10 modes combined. (b) The resulting signal after application of band-pass filtering. The characteristic peaks are numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Figure 17

Table 2. Constants and parameters used in comparison of elastic seabed with rigid seabed.

Figure 18

Figure 17. Surface elevation comparison (elastic versus rigid). Coordinates are $x=1000$ km, $y=0$ km. Coordinate origin at fault centroid. Depths (a) $h=4000$ m and (b) $h=1000$ m.

Figure 19

Figure 18. Left-hand side (LHS) of dispersion relation (3.44) (dashed trace) and right-hand side (RHS) of dispersion relation (solid trace) when $r\in \mathbb {R}$. The frequency is at the point where mode 00 becomes active, $\omega \simeq 6.95\ \textrm {rad s}^{-1}$, $h=4000$ m (see table 1). The top logarithmic plot indicates overall behaviour. The middle and bottom plots provide expanded views. The mode 00 solution in the middle plot is where the solid curve touches the dashed curve $0\leq r\leq 0.1$, and the mode 01 solution (the usual tsunami) in the bottom plot is where the solid curve again makes contact with the dashed curve in the descending phase $2.5 \leq r \leq 3$.

Figure 20

Figure 19. Mode 00 surface–gravity wave with envelope.

Figure 21

Figure 20. Bottom pressure comparison between rigid and elastic seabed. The location of H08N hydrophone is indicated by a red star at bottom left of each panel. By 3625 s, the elastic model has largely cleared of acoustic–gravity waves whereas the rigid model still has strong oscillations around the earthquake zone. (a) Rigid seabed, bottom pressure map calculated at nine time intervals after first fault movement. (b) Elastic seabed, bottom pressure map calculated at the same time intervals.

Figure 22

Figure 21. Comparison of the current elastic model with both hydrophone and seismic data for the Sumatra 2004 event. The time axis begins at UTC 2004-12-26 00:58:53 ($t=0$). The vertical red line represents the arrival time for a propagation speed of $8000\ \textrm {m s}^{-1}$, the vertical green line represents the arrival time for a propagation speed of $C_{s} = 3550\ \textrm {m s}^{-1}$ and the vertical blue line represents the arrival time for a propagation speed of $C_{l}=1450 \ \textrm {m s}^{-1}$.

Figure 23

Figure 22. (a) Locations for the H08N and H08S hydrophone triads, along with the DGAR seismograph (yellow markers). The northern triad is shielded by the Chagos Archipelago. (b) Expanded view of island and west coast of Sumatra. Images from Google Earth.

Figure 24

Figure 23. (a,b) Overlay of elastic model prediction onto hydrophone data of north and south locations. (c,d) North and south hydrophone data with re-scaled vertical axis. Red vertical line, arrival time for phase speed $8000\ \textrm {m s}^{-1}$; green vertical line, arrival time for phase speed $C_{s} = 3550\ \textrm {m s}^{-1}$; blue vertical line, arrival time for phase speed $C_{l} = 1450\ \textrm {m s}^{-1}$.

Figure 25

Figure 24. Leading pulse of hydrophone signal is largely made up of low-frequency components which filtering is able to suppress.

Figure 26

Table 3. Comparison of two key fault parameters (rupture duration and width) obtained by different methods. The second column ($\Delta t_{1,2,3,4}$) reports data obtained by filtering the H11 hydrophone signal and measuring timings between peaks. The third column reports data obtained by the methods described within Gomez (2022). The data in the fourth column are estimates derived from the USGS website.

Figure 27

Figure 25. (a) Recorded hydrophone data from H11 at Wake Island for Samoa 2009 event. Note that $t=0$ does not correspond to the rupture start time. (b) Signal after application of band-pass filtering, focusing on the time interval containing the initiation of the main pulse. Data sampling occurs at 250 Hz (one sample every 4 ms).

Figure 28

Figure 26. The USGS finite fault model dimensions and timings. (a) The USGS finite fault model for Samoa 2009 event with scale at bottom left corner. Rectangular region shown is approximately $30\ \textrm {km} \times 180\ \textrm {km}$. (b) The USGS moment rate function for Samoa 2009 event. The main peak ends between 25 and 35 s.

Figure 29

Table 4. Constants and parameters used in the calculation of surface elevation at DART buoy 21418 for Tohoku 2011 event – elastic model. Also refer to Williams et al. (2021).

Figure 30

Figure 27. Surface elevations compared for Tohoku 2011 event at DART buoy 21418.