An Educational Resource for Visualizing the Global Seismic Wave Field

Abstract

The technology currently available in university classrooms often includes interactive whiteboards, high‐definition displays and projectors; furthermore, many students are equipped with tablet computers. Nevertheless, teaching material that can take advantage of these technologies is time consuming to produce and there is need for additional available material for courses in geophysics. The use of dynamic materials, such as animations and movies in the classroom has been shown to have the ability to enhance learning (e.g., see Mayer and Moreno, 2002, for a review). However, traditional methods of teaching about the global seismic wave field typically involve static imagery. Usually this has been achieved through a combination of drawing ray paths and wave fronts at distinct timesteps. Thus, students have had to build the mental connections between the underlying wave propagation and the static imagery being displayed. But the recent availability of cheap computer clusters has made numerical computation of the seismic wave field in realistic Earth models readily accessible. As a result, animating seismic‐wave propagation has become relatively commonplace. Some of the first global animations of seismic‐wave propagation were produced by summing torsional mode free oscillations in the mantle to show the SH wave field at periods down to 12 s (Wysession and Shore, 1994). This set of animations has been a valuable educational resource and has inspired us to create a new collection. Here, we present a new series of global seismic‐wave animations that includes both the SH and P / SV wave field. In addition, recent developments to the TauP Toolkit (Crotwell et al. , 1999) have made it possible to animate seismic ray paths and wavefronts. Thus, our collection combines the seismic wave field with dynamically drawn ray paths and/or wavefronts. In what follows, we describe a few of the animations that are available on the global scale and …