paper

How winding is the coast of Britain ? Conformal invariance of rocky shorelines

arXiv:0712.3076 · doi:10.1029/2007GL033093

Abstract

We show that rocky shorelines with fractal dimension 4/3 are conformally invariant curves by measuring the statistics of their winding angles from global high-resolution data. Such coastlines are thus statistically equivalent to the outer boundary of the random walk and of percolation clusters. A simple model of coastal erosion gives an explanation for these results. Conformal invariance allows also to predict the highly intermittent spatial distribution of the flux of pollutant diffusing ashore.

References in corpus (4)

Cited by in corpus (17)