Percolation description of the global topography of Earth and Moon

Abstract

Remarkable global correlations exist between geometrical features of terrestrial surface on the Earth, current mean sea level and its geological internal processes whose origins have remained an essential goal in the Earth sciences. Theoretical modeling of the ubiquitous self-similar fractal patterns observed on the Earth and their underlying rules is indeed of great importance. Here I present a percolation description of the global topography of the Earth in which the present mean sea level is automatically singled out as a critical level in the model. This finding elucidates the origins of the appearance of scale invariant patterns on the Earth. The criticality is shown to be accompanied by a continental aggregation, unraveling an important correlation between the water and long-range topographic evolution. To have a comparison point in hand, I apply such analysis onto the lunar topography which reveals various characteristic features of the Moon.

5 pages, 6 figures, accepted in Phys. Rev. Lett

References in corpus (4)

• Conformal Curves on $W{O}_3$ Surface
• How winding is the coast of Britain ? Conformal invariance of rocky shorelines
• Fractal properties of isolines at varying altitude reveal different dominant geological processes on Earth
• Geometrical Phase Transition on WO${}_3$ Surface

Cited by in corpus (23)

• Recent advances in percolation theory and its applications
• Statistical physics approaches to the complex Earth system
• Recent advances and open challenges in percolation
• Percolation framework to describe El Niño conditions
• Micro-transition cascades to percolation
• Percolation Framework of the Earth's Topography
• Percolation in a distorted square lattice
• Blue marble, stagnant lid: Could dynamic topography avert a waterworld?
• Universality class of epidemic percolation transitions driven by random walks
• Percolation Perspective on Sites Not Visited by a Random Walk in Two Dimensions
• Evidence for an ancient sea level on Mars
• Discrete Scale Invariance in Supercritical Percolation
• Emergence of global scaling behaviour in the coupled Earth-atmosphere interaction
• Retention capacity of correlated surfaces
• Percolation in a simple cubic lattice with distortion
• Site percolation in distorted square and simple cubic lattices with flexible number of neighbors
• Exact finite-size scaling for the random-matrix representation of bond percolation on square lattice
• Role of Intensive and Extensive Variables in a Soup of Firms in Economy to Address Long Run Prices and Aggregate Data
• Power laws statistics of cliff failures, scaling and percolation
• Coastlines violate the Schramm-Loewner Evolution
• Percolation analysis of spatiotemporal distribution of population in Seoul and Helsinki
• Bond percolation in distorted square and triangular lattices
• Direct Observation of Quantum Percolation Dynamics