Panorama of Fractals and Their Uses

Rivers

An alternate approach is used by Snow, adopting Richardson's method for measuring the dimension of a coastline. That is,

measuring the length L(d) of a river with a given length d,

we expect

L(d) = Kd^1-D,

where D is the dimension of the river. With this method, Snow reports values

from D = 1.04 for the Wabash river

to D = 1.38 for Big Indian Creek.

Indeed, visually Big Indian Creek is much more sinuous than is the Wabash River.

Return to Rivers.