  Elastic waves of short wavelength propagating through the upper layer of the
Earth appear to move faster at large separations of source and receiver than at
short separations. This scale dependent velocity is a manifestation of Fermat's
principle of least time in a medium with random velocity fluctuations. Existing
perturbation theories predict a linear increase of the velocity shift with
increasing separation, and cannot describe the saturation of the velocity shift
at large separations that is seen in computer simulations. Here we show that
this long-standing problem in seismology can be solved using a model developed
originally in the context of polymer physics. We find that the saturation
velocity scales with the four-third power of the root-mean-square amplitude of
the velocity fluctuations, in good agreement with the computer simulations.
