OBSERVATIONS AND ANALYSIS OF SELF-SIMILAR BRANCHING TOPOLOGY IN GLACIER NETWORKS

Glaciers, like rivers, have a branching structure which can be charact erized by topological trees or networks. Probability distributions of various topological quantities in the networks are shown to satisfy th e criterion for self-similarity, a symmetry structure which might be u sed to simplify future models of glacier dynamics. Two analytical meth ods of describing river networks, Shreve's random topology model and d eterministic self-similar trees, are applied to the six glaciers of so uth central Alaska studied in this analysis. Self-similar trees captur e the topological behavior observed for all of the glaciers, and most of the networks are also reasonably approximated by Shreve's theory.