Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Analysis of Seafloor Topography.
1997
Little, Sarah A. | Smith, Deborah K. | Cawley, Robert
In this project, nonlinear dynamical systems analysis was applied to bathymetric data from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR) in order to determine whether the processes generating seafloor crust can be explained with low-dimensional nonlinear models. The two phase project involved first the refinement and then the application of a noise reduction technique developed by Robert Cawley and Guan Hsu at the Naval Surface Warfare Center. The technique was successfully adapted to accept stacks of bathymetric profiles, and was applied to SeaBeam records collected between the Atlantic and Kane Fracture Zones. The results of the analysis indicated that the raw data is very high dimensional or nearly stochastic. This is interpreted to mean that the sum total of all processes generating seafloor topography can not be explained with a low dimensional model. This result led to the idea of isolating different seafloor generating processes before analysis. To this end, a wave-let decomposition technique was developed and applied to bathymetric data, which successfully isolated fault and seamount locations from the raw bathymetric data.
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