Customer Reviews

Modern Global Seismology, Volume 58 (International Geophysics)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is not for the casual reader. It is written for first year graduate students. To really understand it, you need to know some advanced math,at leadt through differential equations. However, with that background, this is an excellent book. Much easier to read than Aki and Richards. I only wish the book was published when I was a first year graduate student.

The Lay & Wallace provides a good starting description of global seismology. Chapter 1 deals with the historical development and the topics of global seismology. Chapter 2 concerns elasticity and seismic waves. The concepts of strain and stress are introduced. The mathematical content is limited (all you have to know is the partial derivatives) and a lot of figures help you to understand. By the way, this book uses the same boxes as the Aki & Richards to focus on a particular point. The equation of motion and the wave equations are derived.
Chapter 3 deals with Body waves and ray theory.The eikonal equation is introduced,and the body of this chapter concerns travel time propagation, partitioning of energy at a boundary,wave attenuation and scattering in really simple terms. Once again, a lot of figures and documents help the understanding.
Chapter 4 focuses on surface waves and free oscillations and starts with free-surface interactions, Rayleigh and Love waves and their dispersion. Tsunamis are also considered, with only two equations but 6 figures and documents. The end of the chapter is devoted to free oscillations of the earth with once again a lot of documents.
Chapter 5 deals with seismometry, that is what are the instruments used in seismology. This chapter provides differents maps of global networks of seismometers. Chapter 6 considers seismogram interpretation (identification of seismic phases). This is applied to source location. The concept of inversion is introduced with no big deal of maths. The end of the chapter concerns then the generalized inverse and requires more maths. Chapter 7 concerns the determination of Earth structure, and appears in continuity with the previous chapter. No less than 56 figures plus documents are provided to help the understanding of the earth's structure. Seismic tomography is described in simple terms. Then each "layer" of the earth is characterized in terms of seismology.
Chapter 8 focuses on seismic sources, and introduces equivalent body forces, elastostatics, elastodynamics in a very simple way. The seismic moment tensor is introduced here.
Chapter 9 deals with earthquake cinematics and dynamics. It describes the classical 1D Haskell source, the source spetrum. The concepts of stress drop, particle velocity and rupture velocity are explicited. The end of the chapter is devoted to magnitude scales, seismic energy, aftershocks, and the scaling relations of earthquakes.
Chapter 10 tackles the problem of waveform modeling. Finally Chapter 11 deals with seismotectonics and provides plenty of interesting documents.

This book provides an excellent overview of global seismology. It should be extremely useful to teachers (valuable source of documents for your class) and also for those who want to start seismology. Additional reading will be necessary, eventually.

Covers a huge breadth of topics in seismology, is written simply, has great diagrams from important papers ad books, and it's easy to find what you're looking for. I still use it for a reference occasionally, and I'm a 2nd year PhD student. No, it doesn't have the mathematical rigor of Aki and Richards, but when you're just starting out, or if you're more of an observational seismologist than a theoretical seismologist (like me) that can be a relief.

Lay and Wallace present the subject of seismology in a manner that is both simple and complete. The text is not filled with "techno-babble" that often discourages readers. Everything they do say is well-supported and is presented in such a manner that most students in the Earth Sciences can understand. This is the clearest and most thorough book available for teaching seismology. Most instructors have to photo copy portions of other texts to get the breadth of coverage this book offers in one volume.

Lay & Wallace is an excellent blend of theory and observation. Enough equations to get you started, but not the overwhelming number you see in other theoretical seismology volumes. The best part is the reprinting of important result figures from scattered scientific journals. It is wonderful to have all these in one place. The major missing material is a treatment of computational aspects. I hope they put out new editions every few years with new figures from the journals.

I used this book to learn seismology as a graduate student not in geophysics. It is an excellent introductory text and is a distilled version of Aki/Richards. This book assumes you have a decently strong physics/math background. It is a very clear presentation of the material and doesn't go into all of the full out derivations that more advanced Seismology texts do. You will however come out with a solid understanding of nearly all of the topics in more advanced books so it is definitely recommended. Lay and Wallace know their stuff.

This is an excellent book in seismology. It covers all modern aspects of this science in a complete way. The main advantage for both undergraduate and graduate students in using this book is that the Mathematical aspects are treatised without heaviness.

This book is good only if you are not. The book <Quantitative Seismology> by Aki & Richards is much better for a good seismologist.