The free oscillations of an anelastic aspherical earth

Abstract

Summary. Some century-old results, due to Rayleigh and Routh, have been adapted to investigate the normal mode eigenfrequencies and eigenfunctions of an earth with laterally variable anelasticity and to determine the transient response of such an earth to earthquakes. Using degenerate perturbation theory, the eigenfrequencies are found to first order and the associated eigenfunctions to zeroth order in the small deviations of the Earth away from a spherical perfectly elastic reference earth model. Both the eigenfrequencies and the eigenfunctions are complex and, in addition, the latter are not mutually orthogonal, reflecting the non-Hermitian character of the normal mode eigenvalue problem. The effect of laterally heterogeneous attenuation on the shape of an unresolved multiplet spectrum has been investigated in the surface-wave geometrical-optics limit. Singlet cancellation leads in that limit to the appearance of a single resonance peak whose decay rate or apparent Q-' depends only on the average attenuation structure underlying the source-receiver great-circle path.