Things don’t get less complex once the Earth gets involved. The acoustic shock waves may strike soft soil, hard rock, various forms of human infrastructure, and so on, each of which will affect how energy gets transmitted. Some of the energy gets converted into what are called Rayleigh waves, where the energy is transmitted as a wave that moves along the Earth’s surface. The rest go deeper, forming waves that may move through some combination of loose material or the underlying bedrock.
To extract information about the Earth’s structure, you have to understand what the seismic waves from a thunderclap would normally look like. Which, to an extent, requires
→ Continue reading at Ars Technica