Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • News & Views
  • Published:

Geophysics

Finding chaos in abyssal hills

Nature volume 392, pages 225–227 (1998)Cite this article

The simple view is often taken by physical modellers, who look upon oceanic rifting as a test case in which the dynamic processes of an active Earth are barely complicated by factors such as erosion or sedimentation. Modellers tend to speak a deterministic language, specifying their predictions of faults, for example, in terms of regularly spaced fault intervals and uniform fault offsets1,2. Observationalists, by contrast, tend to point to the random, chaotic-looking behaviour of the abyssal-hill fabric, and naturally choose the mathematical language of statistics to quantify their observations3,4.

So observations and predictions have not been directly comparable, and this is the problem addressed by Buck and Poliakov in their paper on page 272 of this issue5. They have developed a numerical physical model of mid-ocean-ridge faulting that produces a chaotic-looking morphology very like that of abyssal hills observed on the sea floor.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Two views of the formation of abyssal hills.

References

  1. Shaw, P. R. & Lin, J. J. Geophys. Res. 98, 21839–21851 (1993).

    Google Scholar 

  2. Shaw, W. J. & Lin, J. J. Geophys. Res. 101, 17977–17993 (1996).

    Google Scholar 

  3. Fox, C. G. & Hayes, D. E. Rev. Geophys. 23, 1–48 (1985).

    Google Scholar 

  4. Goff, J. A. & Jordan, T. H. J. Geophys. Res. 93, 13589–13608 (1988).

    Google Scholar 

  5. Buck, W. R. & Poliakov, A. N. B. Nature 392, 272–275 (1998).

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Mandelbrot, B. B. The Fractal Geometry of Nature (Freeman, New York, 1983).

  7. Hausdorff, F. Mathematische Annalen 79, 157–179 (1919).

    Google Scholar 

  8. von Kármán, T. J. Mar. Res. 7, 252–264 (1948).

    Google Scholar 

  9. Goff, J. A., Ma, Y., Shah, A., Cochran, J. R. & Sempéré, J.-C. J. Geophys. Res. 102, 15521–15534 (1997).

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, 4412 Spicewood Springs Road, Building 600, Austin, 78759, Texas, USA

    John A. Goff

Authors
  1. John A. Goff
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Goff, J. Finding chaos in abyssal hills. Nature 392, 225–227 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/32524

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/32524

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing