  Presented here is a study of well-posedness and asymptotic stability of a
"degenerately damped" PDE modeling a vibrating elastic string. The coefficient
of the damping may vanish at small amplitudes thus weakening the effect of the
dissipation. It is shown that the resulting dynamical system has strictly
monotonically decreasing energy and uniformly decaying lower-order norms,
however, is not uniformly stable on the associated finite-energy space. These
theoretical findings were motivated by numerical simulations of this model
using a finite element scheme and successive approximations. A description of
the numerical approach and sample plots of energy decay are supplied. In
addition, for certain initial data the solution can be determined in closed
form up to a dissipative nonlinear ordinary differential equation. Such
solutions can be used to assess the accuracy of the numerical examples.
