Citation

Turcotte DL, Malamud BD. Physica A Stat. Mech. Appl. 2004; 340(4): 580-589.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Per Bak conceived self-organized criticality as an explanation for the behavior of the sandpile model. Subsequently, many cellular automata models were found to exhibit similar behavior. Two examples are the forest-fire and slider-block models. Each of these models can be associated with a serious natural hazard: the sandpile model with landslides, the forest-fire model with actual forest fires, and the slider-block model with earthquakes. We examine the noncumulative frequency-area statistics for each natural hazard, and show that each has a robust power-law (fractal) distribution. We propose an inverse-cascade model as a general explanation for the power-law frequency-area statistics of the three cellular-automata models and their 'associated' natural hazards.

Language: en