Self-organized criticality: Does it have anything to do with criticality and is it useful?

D. L. Turcotte (1)

1 EAS - Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences [Ithaca)

Three aspects of complexity are fractals, chaos, and self-organized criticality. There are many examples of the applicability of fractals in solid-earth geophysics, such as earthquakes and landforms. Chaos is widely accepted as being applicable to a variety of geophysical phenomena, for instance, tectonics and mantle convection. Several simple cellular-automata models have been said to exhibit self-organized criticality. Examples include the sandpile, forest fire and slider-blocks models. It is believed that these are directly applicable to landslides, actual forest fires, and earthquakes, respectively. The slider-block model has been shown to clearly exhibit deterministic chaos and fractal behaviour. The concept of self-similar cascades can explain self-organized critical behaviour. This approach also illustrates the similarities and differences with critical phenomena through association with the site-percolation and diffusion-limited aggregation models.

Domaines: Cosmologie et astrophysique extra-galactique [astro-ph.CO]; Astrophysique [astro-ph]; Sciences de la Terre

D. L. Turcotte. Self-organized criticality: Does it have anything to do with criticality and is it useful?. Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics, 2001, 8 (4/5), pp.193-196. ⟨hal-00302024⟩