ABSTRACT
As surface gravity water waves propagate through intermediate to shallow water, they induce small motions of the seabed sediments through variations in hydro-dynamic pressure on the sea floor. The layered seabed sediments can be seen to behave in a massless, incompressible, elastic manner in response to water-wave-induced pressures. Under these circumstances it is possible to predict realistically the seabed response to passing water waves if the sediment shear modulus at every depth is known. This new passive sediment remote-sensing method and instrumentation system has been called the Bottom Shear Modulus Profiler (BSMP). This chapter explains a summary of sedimentary results obtained over the past 5 years using the BSMP method. Shear modulus is an important parameter in many theories modeling seismic, acoustic, and surface gravity wave propagation in the ocean. The shear modulus is one of the most important descriptive parameters of a marine sediment.
