Self-organization, the cascade model, and natural hazards.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 11875206.
- Also identified by PMC identifier 128572.
- No licence information is recorded for this record.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
We consider the frequency-size statistics of two natural hazards, forest fires and landslides. Both appear to satisfy power-law (fractal) distributions to a good approximation under a wide variety of conditions. Two simple cellular-automata models have been proposed as analogs for this observed behavior, the forest fire model for forest fires and the sand pile model for landslides. The behavior of these models can be understood in terms of a self-similar inverse cascade. For the forest fire model the cascade consists of the coalescence of clusters of trees; for the sand pile model the cascade consists of the coalescence of metastable regions.