P-Wave & S-Wave Propagation

I made the above demo to compare a radially propagating P-wave to radially propagating (horizontally polarized) S-wave.

Luckily, S-waves travel slower than P-waves (as shown in the video). This is good, because in an earthquake, S-waves are more destructive.

Thus, earthquake detection systems detect P-waves, and send out warnings based on the relative distance between the P-wave and S-wave (It's obviously abit more complicated, however, this is the basic idea).

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Seismic_wave

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Elasticity
• P-waves
• S-waves
• WPI
• physics
• Mathematics
• Math
• wave propagation
• mathematics education