Accurate simulation of seismic waves is of critical importance in a variety of geophysical applications. Based on recent works on staggered discontinuous Galerkin methods, we have developed a new method for the simulations of seismic waves, which has energy conservation and extremely low grid dispersion, so that it naturally provided accurate numerical simulations of wave propagation useful for geophysical applications and was a generalization of classical staggered-grid finite-difference methods. Moreover, it could handle with ease irregular surface topography and discontinuities in the subsurface models. Our new method discretized the velocity and the stress tensor on this staggered grid, with continuity imposed on different parts of the mesh. The symmetry of the stress tensor was enforced by the Lagrange multiplier technique. The resulting method was an explicit scheme, requiring the solutions of a