Self-Organized Criticality in Earth Systems

Self-organized criticality (SOC) has become a magic word in various scientific disciplines; it provides a framework for understanding complexity and scale invariance in systems showing irregular fluctuations. In the first 10 years after Per Bak and his co-workers presented their seminal idea, more than 2000 papers on this topic appeared. Seismology has been a field in earth sciences where the SOC concept has already deepened the understanding, but there seem to be much more examples in earth sciences where applying the SOC concept may be fruitful. After introducing the reader into the basics of fractals, chaos and SOC, the book presents established and new applications of SOC in earth sciences, namely earthquakes, forest fires, landslides and drainage networks.Self-organized criticality (SOC) has become a magic word in various scientific disciplines, it provides a framework for understanding complexity and scale invariance in systems showing irregular fluctuations. In the first years since Per Bak and his co-workers presented their seminal idea, more than 2000 papers on this topic have been published. Seismology has been a rich field in earth sciences where the SOC concept has already deepened understanding, but there seem to be many more examples in earth sciences where applying the SOC concept may be fruitful. After introducing the reader to the basics of fractals, chaos and SOC the book presents established and new applications of SOC in the earth sciences: earthquakes, forest fires, landslides and drainage networks.