Phys. Rev. Lett. 65, 2266–2269 (1990)Growth of fractal fault patternsReceived 9 January 1990; published in the issue dated 29 October 1990 Experiments on the formation of faults in a laboratory model of the Earth’s crust are presented; they respect its vertical rheological stratification, a brittle layer on top of ductile layers. As a result of the competition between the different nature of the brittle and ductile-layer deformations, complex fractal patterns of faults are formed with fractal dimension 1.70±0.05 independent of the fault densities associated with different brittle-ductile coupling. We propose a kinematic formulation of the mechanical problem which suggests an analogy with previously studied fractal-growth problems. © 1990 The American Physical Society URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.65.2266
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.65.2266
PACS:
62.20.Mk, 91.35.Gf, 91.45.-c, 91.60.Ba
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