Experimental Research on the Low Frequency Wave That Radiates into the Air before the Failure of Rock

INTRODUCTIONThephenomenonof“quiescence”beforestrongearthquakeshaswidelybeenaccepted .However,isitreallyquietbeforeanearthquake ?Accordingtorecordsfromshortperiodseismographs,itis“quiet”beforeearthquake ,butaccordingtotherecordsofbroadbandseismograph ,thismaynotbetrue .Thekeytothismatterishowtogetreliableinformation .Earlyinthe 1 970’s,manyseismologiststhoughtthattheultra lowfrequencywaveformrecordedbybroadbandseismometersbeforeearthquakescamefromfore sliporslow extending (Rikitake ,…

Experimental Research on the Low Frequency Wave That Radiates into the Air before the Failure of Rock

Experiments on sonic transmission show that a slabstone can directly transmit part of the energy of a wave excited by knocking or by a transducer into the air. The other part of the wave energy can generate the normal mode of vibration on the slabstone and excite measurable acoustic signals in the air. The dominant frequency is related to the size of the slabstone. These results indicate that the acoustic emission (AE) in rock also displays similar behavior if the source is shallow. It is demonstrated that with the nucleation and propagation of cracks, the dominant frequency of the radiated wave will be lower. When the frequency becomes very low, the wave can be transmitted through the rock into the air and be received by a microphone. According to the theory of similarity of size, there will be low-frequency waves before strong earthquakes because of nucleation of cracks, which can be received by special low-frequency transducers or infrasonic detectors. Before earthquakes, the mechanism of precursors could be very complicated. They might be produced by plastic creep or attributed to liquids but not brittle fracture in most cases. So the periods of the produced waves will be longer. This perhaps accounts for the lack of foreshocks before many strong earthquakes.