Self-Affine Scaling of Earth's Islands

TL;DR

This study investigates Earth's islands' topography, showing they exhibit self-affine scaling with varying Hurst exponents across different features, highlighting the influence of erosion on their fractal geometry.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive quantitative analysis of Earth's islands' self-affine properties using a large dataset and multiple statistical measures to estimate the Hurst exponent.

Findings

Different geometric features have distinct Hurst exponents.

Erosion influences the fractal scaling of island features.

Hurst exponents vary significantly across features.

Abstract

Earth's relief is approximately self-affine, meaning a zoom-in on a small region looks statistically similar to a large region upon a suitable rescaling. Fractional Brownian surfaces give an idealized self-affine model of Earth's relief with one parameter, the Hurst exponent $H$, characterizing the roughness of the surface. To quantitatively assess agreement with Earth elevation data, we compile a large dataset of topographic profiles of islands (N=131,063 with the range of areas covering 8+ orders of magnitude) and obtain four estimates for the Hurst exponent of Earth's surface by fitting four statistical laws from the theory of self-affine surfaces concerning islands: (i) distribution of areas, (ii) volume-area relationship, (iii) perimeter-area relationship, and (iv) maximum height-area relationship. The estimated Hurst exponents differ greatly, indicating different fractal scaling behavior for different geometric features, but are sorted in order of increasing expected influence of erosion at the shorelines.