The fractal dimension of New Zealand fault traces

Abstract

Fractal measure theory is applied in the analysis of the surface fault geometry of the active fault traces of New Zealand. The limited use of the box counting method is explored and analysis of results on the Cantor set are used for comparison. Equations involving complex fractal dimensions with the imaginary part related to discrete spatial scaling are fitted to the data giving improved results over the box counting method. The fractal dimension estimated for the New Zealand fault traces is close to 1.07 and for the fault traces in the Taupo region the analysis gives a fractal dimension close to 1.24.