Love wave

Summary

A Love wave is a horizontally polarized shear wave trapped in a soft surface layer that lies on a stiffer half-space. The ground moves sideways, parallel to the surface and across the direction of travel, and the motion decays with depth in the half-space. Love waves are dispersive: their speed depends on the wavelength and lies between the S-wave speeds of the layer and of the half-space. A. E. H. Love explained them in 1911; they do not exist on a homogeneous half-space, so they show that the Earth's crust is layered.