English

Universal discontinuous percolation transition in the Earth's terrestrial topography

Geophysics 2023-10-10 v1

Abstract

Based on the Topographic Wetness Index (TWI), we studied the percolation process of water on the Earth's land surface and discovered a universal discontinuous phase transition across scales, with a critical TWI threshold of 0.671 (0.054). The discontinuity is attributed to the long-range correlation and directionality of the percolation process. Furthermore, the criticality is shown to extend from the critical point to a region corresponding to the Griffiths phase, where natural lake systems are found to develop, indicating the governess of self-organized criticality within the Earth system.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.05048,
  title  = {Universal discontinuous percolation transition in the Earth's terrestrial topography},
  author = {Shengjie Hu and Zhenlei Yang and Zipeng Wang and Sergio Andres Galindo Torres and Ling Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.05048},
  year   = {2023}
}