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Abstract

The gravito-viscoelastodynamics is the continuum-mechanical description of a viscoelastic and gravitating body under consideration of isentropic perturbations and is usually applied to describe the deformational response of the earth to surface loading and tidal forcing for geodetic applications. In addition to the inertial forces and the gravitational body forces, the interaction between adjacent particles in the continuum involves traction, which is related to deformation by a material law or constitutive equation. For geodetic applications, the consideration of linear viscoelasticity is often sufficient, as this theory is able to describe anelastic damping for periodic processes and the transition to viscous behavior for long-term processes like glacial loading. Thermodynamics is not considered in this formulation. The resulting field equations describe small perturbations from a reference state.