Original scientific paper
Fractal dimension of coastline of the croatian island Cres
Vladimir Paar
Mario Cvitan
Nenad Ocelić
Miroslav Josipović
Abstract
Using 1 : 100 000 geographic map of the island Cres, its coastline was digitalized into bitmap of 1696 x 5052 pixels. This bitmap was analyzed computationally using our redifed box-counting method. It was shown that the log-log diagram separates into two parts: non-selfsimilar and selfsimilar, divided by a critical value of the mesh size. It was found that the power is extremely well satisfied in selfsimilar section of the log-log diagram, reflecting a high degree of statistical fractality of the coastline, almost without detectable fluctuations. Therefrom the over all fractal dimension of the coastline of Cres was determined as Dв = 1.118 ± 0.001. It was found that partial fractal dimensions of particular parts of the coastline of Cres exhibits a high degree of stable statistical self-similarity. A possible origin of this pattern was suggested along the lines of a recent model of water erosion as a fractal growth process simulated on a lattice which was used to model the stationary state of the river pattern such as a power-law size distribution of the drainage basin area and for the Horton`s law. In light of our results for overall fractal dimension we discuss the problem of dependence of the length of coastline on precision of measurement and present the corresponding asymptotic formula.
Keywords
Island Cres; box-counting method; fractal dimension; power law for the coastline; overall fractal dimension of the coastline; partial geographic fractal dimension of the coastline; water erosion process; relief; lenght of coastline
Hrčak ID:
84620
URI
Publication date:
1.12.1997.
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