EARTH 520 Problem Set: Snells Law and Constructing a P Wave Travel Time Curve Your Name: Your

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Part 1: Snells Law 1. Calculate the angle of refraction for a ray of light passing from air to water with an incident angle of 45. Assume the index of refraction of water (nwater)is 1.33 and nair is 1.

2. Calculate the angle of refraction for a ray of light passing from water to air with an incident angle of 45.

3. Suppose you have a ray of light that passes through three layers: air - water - air. The angle of incidence at the first air - water boundary is 30. (This angle is marked in red in the diagram below. Calculate the angle of refraction at the first boundary (orange angle in the diagram below) and calculate both the angle of incidence (green angle) and angle of refraction (blue angle) at the second (water - air) boundary. See the diagram below, which is not drawn to scale!

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EARTH 520 Problem Set: Snells Law and Constructing a P Wave Travel Time Curve

4. Now suppose you have a ray of light that passes through the three following layers: air - water - crown glass (ncrown glass = 1.52). The angle of incidence of the light ray at the air-water boundary is 30. Calculate the speed of light in crown glass.

5. Now suppose you have a ray of light that passes from air into a material through which light travels at a velocity of 1.5 x 108 m/s. If the angle of incidence is 45, calculate the angle of refraction.

6. Which words make this a true sentence? "When a ray of light passes from a fast/slow material, the ray is bent towards/away from the normal."

7. Now let's consider the raypath taken by a seismic wave instead of light. For the purposes of this calculation, we'll pretend the Earth is flat. (On the next page in this lesson we'll see what happens for a spherical Earth). An earthquake happens at the surface of a series of layers as pictured below. Consider a P wave that leaves the source along the raypath as shown in the cartoon and hits the boundary between the upper layer and the second layer with an angle of incidence of 30. Given the transmitting velocities for a P wave in all the subsequent layers, sketch the path of the ray until it hits the bottom, and find all the angles of incidence and refraction along the way. The velocities in this problem are some typical mantle velocities (Dziewonski and Anderson, 1981).

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EARTH 520 Problem Set: Snells Law and Constructing a P Wave Travel Time Curve

Part 2: Constructing a P Wave Travel Time Curve 1. For each seismogram, pick the arrival time of the P wave. The P wave is the first impulsive arrival that rises appreciably higher than the background noise level. 2. Calculate the time it took the P wave to get to each station. 3. Calculate the distance between each station and the event in degrees. 4. Make a plot of distance in degrees vs. P wave travel-time. 5. Which station was closest and which station was farthest away? What were the distances between the earthquake and each of these two stations? 6. This event was large enough that it was recorded by stations even farther away than the farthest station you worked with. Why didn't I make you pick P waves for farther away stations? 7. Choose any station in this exercise and make the following sketches. You can make the sketches however you wish, but you have to submit this problem set electronically so scan it if you draw them by hand. Using the simple drawing tools that most word processing programs have is fine with me. I'm not looking for major artwork here. I am looking for a more or less accurate representation of the angular distance separating your chosen station and the event, and a P-wave path that has about the right shape. a. b. Draw the event-station path taken by the P wave for the case of a homogeneous mantle Draw the event-station path taken by the P wave for a mantle whose velocity increases smoothly with depth.

8. Assume a constant mantle velocity of 11 km/sec. Draw the travel-time curve for this velocity on your plot using a different symbol / linestyle than your original line that you made for your own observations. 9. How does our assumed constant velocity of 11 km/sec compare to your observations?

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