Selforganized criticality SOC has become a magic word in various scientificdisciplines it provides a framework for understanding complexity and scaleinvariance ... » 

Selforganized criticality SOC has become a magic word in various scientificdisciplines it provides a framework for understanding complexity and scaleinvariance in systems showing irregular fluctuations. In the first 10 yearsafter Per Bak and his coworkers presented their seminal idea more than 2000papers on this topic appeared. Seismology has been a field in earth scienceswhere the SOC concept has already deepened the understanding but there seem tobe much more examples in earth sciences where applying the SOC concept may befruitful. After introducing the reader into the basics of fractals chaos andSOC the book presents established and new applications of SOC in earthsciences namely earthquakes forest fires landslides and drainage networks.TOCFractals Fractal distributions Is the Earths Surface Fractal?Recognizing PowerLaw Distributions Do Cumulative Size Distributions Tell theTruth? Binning Censoring. SelfAffine Time Series Brownian Motion Persistence Stationarity and Predictability. Deterministic Chaos Linearand NonLinear Systems Limit Sysles and Strange Attractors. SelfOrganizedCriticality CriticalPoint Phenomena Universality. Earthquakes and StickSlip Motion The Fractal Character of Earthquakes Efficient Simulation ofthe OFC Model. Landslides Triggering Mechanisms and Driving Forces OnPredicting Slope Stability. Drainage Networks Fractal Properties of DrainageNetworks Optimization by Permanent Reorganization? Where do we stand? SomeFractal Size Distributions Tools for Data Analysis The Lorenz Equations Numerics of Ordinary Differential Equations. «