Seismic waves from an earthquake race through Earth’s interior 🏁 They zoom through cold, rigid material and crawl through hotter, softer zones. Why does Earth act like the ultimate traffic controller? And what does the journey from earthquake to receiver look like for a seismic wave? Learn all this and more on the new Seismology page of our "What is geophysics?" section ➡ https://loom.ly/LlGzbB0 | EarthScope Consortium

With seismic tomography, scientists map out large regions where seismic waves travel slower or faster than average to develop images of individual slices through Earth's interior. Seismic waves travel faster through cold, stiff materials, like a subducting plate, and slower through warmer materials, like hot rock rising to the surface. These models—with areas where seismic waves travel more quickly in blue, and slower areas in red—allow scientists to infer structures like sinking tectonic plates

Watch the waves from the M6.1 earthquake in Alaska roll across seismic stations in North America. This animation, called a Ground Motion Visualization (GMV), shows the motion of the ground as detected on seismometers across North America - each dot is a seismic station and when the ground moves up it turns red and when it moves down it turns blue. Waves generated by an earthquake travel around and through the earth, but they get smaller (attenuate) as they move away from the earthquake location,