 Solution

The sea ice acts as a frequency-selective filter. Over a long path, wave attenuation in sea ice is generally much stronger for shorter surface gravity waves, through repeated scattering, internal ice losses and water-side dissipation. Their amplitude can fall below the tiltmeter's detection level even if the source initially generated them. Thus the long-period swell survives while the shorter-period tail does not.

The disappearance near 14 s is an attenuation and detectability limit, not a forbidden-frequency interval of the ideal elastic plate. The flexural-gravity wave dispersion relation admits a real positive wavenumber for every positive angular frequency. In an impulsive-source picture, shorter-period deep-water gravity waves also arrive later because their group velocity is smaller, but delayed arrival alone does not explain a persistent observed cutoff.