Fractals in the Earth Sciences, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 1995

Fractals have changed the way we understand and study nature. This change has been brought about mainly by the work of B. B. Mandelbrot and his book The Fractal Geometry of Nature. Now here is a book that collects articles treating fractals in the earth sciences. The themes chosen span, as is appropriate for a discourse on fractals, many orders of magnitude; including earthquakes, ocean floor topography, fractures, faults, mineral crystallinity, gold and silver deposition. There are also chapters on dynamical processes that are fractal, such as rivers, earthquakes, and a paper on self-organized criticality. Many of the chapters discuss how to estimate fractal dimensions, Hurst exponents, and other scaling exponents. This book, in a way, represents a snapshot of a field in which fractals has brought inspiration and a fresh look at familiar subjects. New ideas and attempts to quantify the world we see around us are found throughout. Many of these ideas will grow and inspire further work, others will be superseded by new observations and insights, most probably with future contributions by the authors of these chapters.

Fractal Distributions in Geology, Scale Invariance, and Deterministic Chaos (D.L. Turcotte, J. Huang). Some Long Run Properties of Geophysical Records (B.B. Mandelbrot, J.R. Wallis). Some Remarks on the Numerical Estimation of Fractal Dimension (S.A. Pruess). Measuring the Dimension of Selfaffine Fractals: The Example of Rough Surfaces (S.R. Brown). A Review of the Fractal Character of Natural Fault Surfaces with Implications for Friction and the Evolution of Fault Zones (W.L. Power, T.E. Tullis). Fractals and Ocean Floor Topography: A Review and a Model (A. Malinverno). Fractal Transitions on Geological Surfaces (C.H. Scholz). Fractal Scaling of Fracture Networks (C.C. Barton). Fractal Fragmentation in Crustal Shear Zones (C.G. Sammis, S.J. Steacy). Fractal Distribution of Fault Length and Offsets: Implications on Brittle Deformation Evaluation: The Lorraine Coal Basin (T. Villemin et al.). Fractal Dynamics of Earthquakes (P. Bak, K. Chen). Mineral Crystallinity in Igneous Rocks: Fractal Method (A.D. Fowler). Fractal Structure of Electrum Dendrites in Bonanza Epithermal AuAg Deposits (J.A. Saunders, P.A. Schoenly). Appendix. Index.

This well-illustrated volume reviews the many applications of fractal geometry used to study earth science patterns and processes. The papers represent a broad spectrum of earth science disciplines where patterns have proven to be fractal over many orders of magnitude in time or space.