Fractal Behaviour Of The Earth System

V. P. Dimri Fractal Behaviour of the Earth System V. P. Dimri (Editor) Fractal Behaviour of the Earth System Foreword by Prof. D. L. Turcotte With 172 Figures, 19 in colour EDITOR: DR. V. P. DIMRI NATIONAL GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE UPPAL ROAD HYDERABAD, 500 007 INDIA E-MAIL: [email protected] COVER PAGE: TSUNAMI WAVE GENERATED USING FRACTAL ART BY KEN KELLER, REF: HTTP://FRACTALARTGALLERY.COM ISBN 10 ISBN 13 3-540-26532-5 Springer Berlin Heidelberg New York 978-3-540-26532-0 Springer Berlin Heidelberg New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2005929657 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilm or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the German Copyright Law of September 9, 1965, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer-Verlag. Violations are liable to prosecution under the German Copyright Law. Springer is a part of Springer Science+Business Media springeronline.com © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005 Printed in The Netherlands The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Cover design: E. Kirchner, Heidelberg Production: A. Oelschläger Typesetting: Camera-ready by the Editor Printed on acid-free paper 32/2132/AO 5 4 3 2 1 0 Foreword It is with pleasure that I write the foreword to this excellent book. A wide range of observations in geology and solid-earth geophysics can be explained in terms of fractal distributions. In this volume a collection of papers considers the fractal behavior of the Earth's continental crust. The book begins with an excellent introductory chapter by the editor Dr. V.P. Dimri. Surface gravity anomalies are known to exhibit power-law spectral behavior under a wide range of conditions and scales. This is self-affine fractal behavior. Explanations of this behavior remain controversial. In chapter 2 V.P. Dimri and R.P. Srivastava model this behavior using Voronoi tessellations. Another approach to understanding the structure of the continental crust is to use electromagnetic induction experiments. Again the results often exhibit power law spectral behavior. In chapter 3 K. Bahr uses a fractal based random resister network model to explain the observations. Other examples of power-law spectral observations come from a wide range of well logs using various logging tools. In chapter 4 M. Fedi, D. Fiore, and M. La Manna utilize multifractal models to explain the behavior of well logs from the main KTB borehole in Germany.