Robert S. Hart

Attenuation models of the earth

Free oscillation and body wave data are used to construct average Q models for the earth. The data set includes fundamental and overtone observations of the radial, spheroidal and toroidal modes, ScS observations and amplitudes of body waves as a function of distance. The preferred model includes a low-Q zone at both the top and the bottom of the mantle. In these regions the seismic velocities are likely to be frequency dependent in the “seismic” band. Absorption in the mantle is predominantly due to losses in shear. Compressional absorption may be important in the inner core. A grain-boundary relaxation model is proposed that explains the dominance of shear over compressional dissipation, the roughly frequency independent average values for Q and the variation of Q with depth. In the high-Q regions, the lithosphere and the midmantle (200–2000 km), Q is predicted to be frequency dependent. However, the low-Q regions of the earth, where Q is roughly frequency independent, dominate the observations of attenuation.

Shear velocity and density of an attenuating earth

The dispersion that must accompany absorption is taken into account in many recent body-wave investigations but has been largely ignored in surface-wave and free-oscillation studies. In order to compare body-wave and free-oscillation data a correction must be made to travel times or periods to account for absorption-related physical dispersion. The correction depends on the frequency and Q of the data and can be as high as 1% which is much larger than the uncertainty of the raw data. Corrected toroidal mode data is inverted to obtain shear velocity and density versus depth. The average shear velocity in the upper 600 km is ∼2% greater than obtained from the uncorrected data. The resulting shear-wave travel times oscillate about the Jeffreys-Bullen values with an average baseline of only +0.5 second. Thus, the discrepancy between body-wave and free-oscillation studies is eliminated.