Resonant Seismic Motion Within a Sedimentary Basin Revisited

TL;DR

This paper investigates the resonant seismic response within a sedimentary basin, demonstrating how certain frequencies cause amplification of seismic waves due to resonance, with implications for understanding seismic hazards.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical and integral representation of seismic wave behavior in a semi-circular basin, highlighting the resonance phenomena and energy distribution between damping mechanisms.

Findings

Resonant frequencies cause significant amplification within the basin.

Energy loss is split between radiation damping and volumic damping.

Results are applicable to basins of various shapes, as shown by comparison with numerical studies.

Abstract

The problem, of 2D canonical nature, examined herein in the space-frequency framework, concerns a SH-polarized plane body seismic wave propagating in a hard, non lossy half space (bedrock) containing a soft, lossy cylindrical basin of semi-circular shape. The displacement response, at points both within and outside the basin is represented alternatively in integral (for basins of general shape) and partial wave (for basins of semi-circular shape) forms, the integral representation leading to an expression of a sort of conservation of energy relation, and an explanation of how the energetic gain provided by the incident wave, is divided essentially into two sources of loss: radiation damping (taking place in the bedrock) and volumic material damping (taking place within the basin), whereas the partial wave representation enables a detailed theoretical demonstration of the resonant nature of the response, marked by amplification and concentration of the displacement field essentially within the basin at certain (eigen-)frequencies and very little, or no amplification and concentration, at other frequencies. These phenomena carry over to the volumic material damping and radiation damping loss functions (of frequency), with the equivalent of resonant displacement response residing in peaks of the volumic material damping loss function and troughs of the radiation damping loss function. Maps, for the semi-circular basin, are computed herein of the displacement field both at resonant and non-resonant frequencies which strongly evoke those (of numerical nature resulting from the boundary element scheme) appearing in two publications by other authors for basins of more realistic shape, so as to suggest that the results in the present study are applicable, for a large part, to basins of general shape.