  Most modern buildings and infrastructures are not designed to resist 8th
magnitude earthquakes, for which studies on phononic crystals and local
resonators reported so far are not particularly suited. We report a type of
all-metallic decorated membrane resonators as deep subwavelength vibration
dampers, which are modeled as meta-soil, that can block and even totally absorb
underground seismic waves up to 8th magnitude earthquakes. Transmission
attenuation exceeding 20 dB and absorption up to 98 % are numerically
demonstrated for 1 Hz Rayleigh waves by a dozen rows of vertical underground
wells filled with the meta-soil. A scaling law in the same form as the mass
density law for airborne acoustic waves has been analytically derived and
numerically verified.
