Shallow lunar fractures dominate the long-lasting seismic coda
Abstract
Lunar seismic records are characterized by long-lasting spindle-shaped coda, which has long been considered to be caused by strong velocity contrasts in a continuous-medium lunar crust; however, simulated waveforms could not well match the observation even with unrealistically strong velocity contrasts, demonstrating its mechanism still unsolved. Here we propose a novel model of coda wave generation with random fractures in the lunar crust, where vacuum fractures prevent seismic wave propagation as insulating boundaries, causing strong persistent reverberation in terms of total reflection among fractures. Our model can easily reproduce the typical characteristics of observed Apollo data even using a limited number of simplified fractures in homogeneous matrix, with envelope correlations over 0.9, much higher than previous studies. Numerical simulations suggest that fractures in the uppermost ~1 km of the crust may dominate lunar seismic scattering. This model enables us to investigate the shallow lunar fracture system using seismic data and to suppress seismic coda for detecting critical phases reflected from deep interiors.
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BibTeX
@misc{zhang2026shallow,
title = {{Shallow lunar fractures dominate the long-lasting seismic coda}},
author = {Lei Zhang and Qian Huang and Minghao Huang and Jinhai Zhang and Dijun Guo},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.04209},
eprint = {2611.04209},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04209},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Shallow lunar fractures dominate the long-lasting seismic coda
AU - Lei Zhang
AU - Qian Huang
AU - Minghao Huang
AU - Jinhai Zhang
AU - Dijun Guo
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/03
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.04209
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04209
AB - Lunar seismic records are characterized by long-lasting spindle-shaped coda, which has long been considered to be caused by strong velocity contrasts in a continuous-medium lunar crust; however, simulated waveforms could not well match the observation even with unrealistically strong velocity contrasts, demonstrating its mechanism still unsolved. Here we propose a novel model of coda wave generation with random fractures in the lunar crust, where vacuum fractures prevent seismic wave propagation as insulating boundaries, causing strong persistent reverberation in terms of total reflection among fractures. Our model can easily reproduce the typical characteristics of observed Apollo data even using a limited number of simplified fractures in homogeneous matrix, with envelope correlations over 0.9, much higher than previous studies. Numerical simulations suggest that fractures in the uppermost ~1 km of the crust may dominate lunar seismic scattering. This model enables us to investigate the shallow lunar fracture system using seismic data and to suppress seismic coda for detecting critical phases reflected from deep interiors.
ER -