A point dislocation in a layered, transversely isotropic and self-gravitating Earth - Part II: Accurate Green's functions

Abstract

We present an accurate approach for calculating the point-dislocation Green?s functions (GFs) for a layered, spherical, transversely-isotropic and self-gravitating Earth. The formalism is based on the approach recently used to find analytical solutions for the dislocation Love numbers (DLNs). However, in order to make use of the DLNs, we first analyse their asymptotic behaviour, and then the behaviour of the GFs computed from the DLNs. We note that the summations used for different GF components evolve at different rates towards asymptotic convergence, requiring us to use two new and different truncation values for the harmonic degree (i.e. the index of summation). We exploit this knowledge to design a Kummer transformation that allows us to reduce the computation required to evaluate the GFs at the desired level of accuracy. Numerical examples are presented to clarify these issues and demonstrate the advantages of our approach. Even with the Kummer transformation, DLNs of high degree are still needed when the earth model contains very fine layers, so computational efficiency is important. The effect of anisotropy is assessed by comparing GFs for isotropic and transversely isotropic media. It is shown that this effect, though normally modest, can be significant in certain contexts, even in the far field.