Postseismic stress relaxation in a layered spherical Earth with linear viscoelastic rheologies

Abstract

We present the new capabilities offered by the application of the Post-Widder Laplace inversion formula to semianalytical postseismic stress modeling in a spherical, viscoelastic self-gravitating Earth. Within the normal-mode solution framework, the Post-Widder algorithm allows to recover the temporal dependence of the physical observables without the explicit computation of Bromwhich path integrals; in this way, many of the limitations of normal-mode based models are completely bypassed. With this approach, the detail of the rheological profile is limited only by the available computing resources, and any linear viscoelastic rheology can be implemented. At the same time, the numerical codes are much simplified and can be easily parallelized in order to take advantage of multiprocessor systems.