SPECTRAL CHARACTERISTICS OF IRREGULARITIES OF DENSITY OF MARINE SEDIMENTS AS INDICATED BY DEEP-SEA DRILLING DATA

Abstract

Analysis of these data indicates that the dependence of the main acoustic characteristics of the sediments (density and sound velocity) on depth has the form of irregular fluctuations superposed on an overall (regular) trend. Hitherto, the main focus in the construction of geoacoustic models of the sea floor has been on the regular component of these plots, obtained by averaging (smoothing of the irregular fluctuations) [1-4]. The resulting sea floor models, which describe the characteristic features of the regular (stratified) structure of sediments, are useful in forecasting the sound field reflected from the sea floor in various regions of the ocean. But they contain no information on random variations in the thickness of sediments which are needed to calculate the scattering properties of the sea floor. In the present paper the authors use deep-sea drilling data to analyze this irregular structure of the sediments and to construct a statistical model of random variations in their thickness. Translated from Russian: Yefimov A.V., Ivakin A.N. and Lysanov Yu.P. (1988), “Spectral'nyye kharakteristiki neodnorodnostey morskikh osadkov po dannym glubokovodnogo bureniya”, Doclady Akademii Nauk SSSR, 301(3), 710-712.