Seismic Wave Propagation for Complex Rheologies: Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for the Simulation ofEarthquakes

Seismic waves are produced whenever a large amount ofenergy is released under the surface of the Earth,for example when earthquakes occur.Such waves are perturbed by the heterogeneities theyfind in their travel through the subsurface, fromhypocenter to seismometer.In the last decades, the increase in computationalpower has made it possible to simulate thepropagation of seismic waves in fully 3Dheterogeneous media. However, the subsoil oftendisplays very complicated geometrical structureswhich are difficult to nest by nowadays simulationmethods.The ADER-DG (Arbitrary high-order DERivativesDiscontinuous Galerkin) method provides the means tobetter represent subsoil geological structures usingtetrahedral meshes. Such meshes can be easilydeformed and adapted to very complicated geometriessuch as folded layers, faults and shallow basins.In this book the ADER-DG method is developed forproblems of elastodynamics and further extended toaccommodate anisotropic, viscoelastic and poroelasticrheologies.For all cases examples are provided to verify thefast convergence properties and to show the precisionof the synthetic seismograms computed.