Presentation by Ved Lekić.
Decoding Earthquake and Marsquake Waveforms to Reveal Planetary Interiors
Earthquakes and meteorite impacts produce elastic waves that travel through planetary interiors along a variety of trajectories, interacting with internal structures along the way. Three-component, high-fidelity recordings of these waves hold a treasure-trove of information about the conditions of the inaccessible interiors of planets. Quantitative analysis of this information leverages computational modeling to identify signals of particular interest and to interpret them in the context of other observations and the physics of wavefield propagation. In this talk, I illustrate two approaches to the analysis of seismic recordings of earthquakes and marsquakes collected by extensive seismic networks on our planet and the single high-fidelity instrument deployed by NASA’s InSight mission to Mars. I then discuss how the insights from these analyses have led to new discoveries about the core-mantle boundary regions of both planets.