Pond fractals in a tidal flat
Name
PhysRevE.92.052128.pdf
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785.04 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
c10a88953b82901ee5a1c0fba05f555d
Author(s)
Cael, B. B.
Bisson, Kelsey
Lambert, Bennett Spencer
Date Issued
November 2015
Journal
Physical Review E
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Cael, B. B., Bennett Lambert, and Kelsey Bisson. “Pond Fractals in a Tidal Flat.” Physical Review E 92, no. 5 (November 19, 2015).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Studies over the past decade have reported power-law distributions for the areas of terrestrial lakes and Arctic melt ponds, as well as fractal relationships between their areas and coastlines. Here we report similar fractal structure of ponds in a tidal flat, thereby extending the spatial and temporal scales on which such phenomena have been observed in geophysical systems. Images taken during low tide of a tidal flat in Damariscotta, Maine, reveal a well-resolved power-law distribution of pond sizes over three orders of magnitude with a consistent fractal area-perimeter relationship. The data are consistent with the predictions of percolation theory for unscreened perimeters and scale-free cluster size distributions and are robust to alterations of the image processing procedure. The small spatial and temporal scales of these data suggest this easily observable system may serve as a useful model for investigating the evolution of pond geometries, while emphasizing the generality of fractal behavior in geophysical surfaces.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.92.052128
