FRACTAL STRUCTURE OF STYLOLITES

The recognition of fractal structure in stratigraphic systems is becom ing increasingly widespread, Wit hin the plethora of scale-invariant s edimentary structures, stylolites are one of the most visually suggest ive of fractal form, Traces of stylolites, viewed in vertical section, have been studied by standard Fourier spectral analysis and are found to possess spectra typical of 1/f fractional noises, The power distri bution is significantly shifted towards the low-frequency end of the s pectrum, This red-shifted spectrum is best modeled as a persistent fra ctional noise. Such noise spectra are those where successive positions along the data series, in this case the trace of the stylolite are st rongly positively correlated, Therefore, stylolite are readily modeled as strongly persistent Brownian trails. Regression of the noise spect rum shows the fractal dimension of the stylolite trace to be 1.346.