Fractured but Not Fractal: Fragmentation of the Gulf of Suez Basement

Korvin, Gábor (1989) Fractured but Not Fractal: Fragmentation of the Gulf of Suez Basement. PURE AND APPLIED GEOPHYSICS, 131 (1-2). pp. 289-305. ISSN 0033-4553

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Abstract

Recent geophysical studies revealed that the Palaeozoic basement of the Gulf of Suez consists of an enormous number of fault blocks whose network qualitatively resembles the contractioncrack polygons which can be found in nature in a wide variety of materials and on all scales (mud cracks, hardening concrete, age cracking in paintings, etc.). The fault network of the Gulf of Suez basement forms a rather uniformly spaced polygonal pattern, most of the blocks are four-sided, the lengths of block sides parallel with the Gulf of Suez axis are exponentially distributed. The power-law size distribution associated with the fractal (scale-free) fragmentation can be possibly ruled out. The paper calls attention to the necessity of classifying the physical processes leading to fragmentations with exponential-, lognormal-, and power-law size distributions, respectively.

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