Stress associated coda attenuation from ultrasonic waveform measurements

Abstract

The theoretical and practical exploration of stress changes from seismic waves has been the focus of recent debate within the scientific community because of its direct implications on earthquake forecasts and seismic hazards. Propagating in underground structures, wave velocity and attenuation contain information on stress changes of the Earth's interior as a result of changes in the physical state of materials. Seismic coda, which consists of a superposition of incoherent scattered waves, is known to reflect smallscale random heterogeneities in the earth medium. In this article, we investigate the coda attenuation under different effective stresses using laboratory measurements to increase our understanding of the dependence of acoustic-coda attenuation on stress variations in rocks. Copyright 2007 by the American Geophysical Union.