THEORETICAL GLOBAL SEISMOLOGY

By F.A. Dahlen and Jeroen Tromp
Princeton University Press 1998
1025 pages

ISBN 0691-00116-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 0-691-00124-3 (paperback)
Library of Congress QE534.2.D34

After every major earthquake, the Earth rings like a bell for several days.  These free oscillations of the Earth and the related propagating body and surface waves are routinely detected at broad-band seismographic stations around the world.  In this book, Dahlen and Tromp present a comprehensive and advanced theoretical treatment of global seismology, describing the normal-mode, body-wave, and surface-wave methods employed in the determination of the Earth's three-dimensional internal structure and the source mechanisms of earthquakes.  The three parts--Foundations, The Spherical Earth and The Aspherical Earth--are concerned primarily with the forward problem of global seismology--detailing how synthetic seismograms and spectra may be calculated and interpreted.  As a long-needed unification of methods and results in this active field, Theoretical Global Seismology will be important to graduate students in geophysics and allied fields, as well as to professional seismologists, geodynamicists, geomagnetists, and astronomers who study the oscillations of the Sun and other stars.
 

"Theoretical Global Seismology is both comprehensive and elegant.  The treatise can serve superbly as a text for a very thorough one-year graduate course, and, as well, as a reference of great authority, scope and depth.  It should be on the shelf of every seismologist and all other scientists with an interest into how the deep Earth is probed.  I look forward to the early appearance of dog-ears on my copy."

 

"Dahlen and Tromp have crafted a masterful treatise for all interested in the theory of terrestrial elastic waves.  This exhaustive book furnishes the practicing scientist with a much-needed compendium of research results from the last twenty years, including thoroughly up-to-date treatments of wave propagation in the aspherical, anisotropic, and anelastic media.  It also provides the novice with an accessible text that clarifies many previously muddled theoretical concepts.  Seismologists will appreciate the cross-linkages made by the authors with work on wave propagation in other areas of physics."

 

"Dahlen and Tromp's Theoretical Global Seismology is an impressive piece of work.  As a comprehensive reference for researchers and advanced graduate students, there really isn't any competition.  This is the only book on the topic that does a thorough job of developing the underlying principles of continuum mechanics in a seismological context."

 

"This impressive book represents considerable effort on the part of the authors.  In particular, it provides, for the first time, complete treatments of the effects of rotation, ellipticity, lateral heterogeneity, and anelasticity upon seismic wave propagation and the free oscillations of the Earth."