Landslides, forest fires, and earthquakes: examples of self-organized critical behavior

✍ Scribed by Donald L Turcotte; Bruce D Malamud

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 373 KB
• Volume: 340
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0378-4371
• DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2004.05.009

✦ Synopsis

Per Bak conceived self-organized criticality as an explanation for the behavior of the sandpile model. Subsequently, many cellular automata models were found to exhibit similar behavior. Two examples are the forest-ÿre and slider-block models. Each of these models can be associated with a serious natural hazard: the sandpile model with landslides, the forest-ÿre model with actual forest ÿres, and the slider-block model with earthquakes. We examine the noncumulative frequency-area statistics for each natural hazard, and show that each has a robust power-law (fractal) distribution. We propose an inverse-cascade model as a general explanation for the power-law frequency-area statistics of the three cellular-automata models and their 'associated' natural hazards.