Panorama of Fractals and Their Uses

Rivers

An alternate approach is used by Snow, adopting Richardson's method for measuring the dimension of a coastline. That is,
measuring the length L(d) of a river using a polygonal approximation with sides of length d,
we expect
L(d) = K⋅d1-D,
where D is the dimension of the river. With this method, Snow reports values from D ≈ 1.04 for the Wabash river to D ≈ 1.38 for Big Indian Creek.
Indeed, visually Big Indian Creek is much more sinuous than is the Wabash River.

Return to Rivers.