Self-Organized Criticality in Earth Systems

Stefan Hergarten

• 01 december 2010
• 9783642077906

Samenvatting:

Seismology has been a field in earth sciences where the SOC concept has already deepened the understanding, but there seem to be much more examples in earth sciences where applying the SOC concept may be fruitful.

Self-organized criticality (SOC) has become a magic word in various scientific disciplines, it provides a framework for understanding complexity and scale invariance in systems showing irregular fluctuations. In the first years since Per Bak and his co-workers presented their seminal idea, more than 2000 papers on this topic have been published. Seismology has been a rich field in earth sciences where the SOC concept has already deepened understanding, but there seem to be many more examples in earth sciences where applying the SOC concept may be fruitful. After introducing the reader to the basics of fractals, chaos and SOC the book presents established and new applications of SOC in the earth sciences: earthquakes, forest fires, landslides and drainage networks.