Storm-triggered S waves tracked for first time
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.0210062
BBC : Earthquakes aren’t the only phenomena to send seismic waves through Earth’s interior. When a large storm forms water, the energy from colliding ocean waves can create weak seismic activity—dubbed a microseism—that travels through the crust. The pressure-wave microseisms from storms have been tracked regularly, but the transverse S waves, which move much more slowly, have never been tied directly to a storm until now. Kiwamu Nishida from the University of Tokyo and Ryota Takagi of Tohoku University used a dense network of seismic detectors off the Japanese coast to measure S waves and pin their source to a storm off the coast of Greenland. Researchers should be able to learn about Earth’s interior structure by comparing the propagation of S and P waves from the same storm.
