Landscape texture set to scale

摘要

The dissection of topography into ridges and valleys sets the scene for all manner of processes - physical, chemical and biological -that operate on Earth's surface. How do these processes interact to set the scale of this dissection? Although many other aspects of land-forms seem to be scale-invariant, there are plenty of instances in which our own eyes tell us that ridges and valleys are uniformly spaced (Fig. 1) - that there is a fundamental scale to landforms. This impression can be confirmed quantitatively.