Percolation description of the global topography of Earth and Moon
Remarkable global correlations exist between geometrical features of
terrestrial surface on the Earth, current mean sea level and its geological
internal processes whose origins have remained an essential goal in the Earth
sciences. Theoretical modeling of the ubiquitous self-similar fractal patterns
observed on the Earth and their underlying rules is indeed of great importance.
Here I present a percolation description of the global topography of the Earth
in which the present mean sea level is automatically singled out as a critical
level in the model. This finding elucidates the origins of the appearance of
scale invariant patterns on the Earth. The criticality is shown to be
accompanied by a continental aggregation, unraveling an important correlation
between the water and long-range topographic evolution. To have a comparison
point in hand, I apply such analysis onto the lunar topography which reveals
various characteristic features of the Moon.