Self-affinities of landforms and folds in the Northeast Honshu Arc, Japan

A method to analyze self-affinities is introduced and applied to the large scale fold geometries of Quaternary and Tertiary sediments or geographical topographies in the inner belt of the Northeast Honshu Arc, Japan. Based on this analysis, their geometries are self-affine and can be differently scaled in different directions. We recognize a crossover from local to global altitude (vertical) variation of the geometries of folds and topographies. The characteristic length for the crossover of topographies (landforms) is about 25 km and is related to the half wavelength of the crustal buckling folds or possible maximum magnitude of inland earthquakes in the Northeast Honshu Arc. Moreover, self-affinity of the folds and topographies can be connected with the b -value in Gutenberg-Richter℉s law. We obtain two average Hurst exponents obtained from the self-affinities of folds in the Northeast Honshu Arc. This indicates that there are two possible seismic modes for the smaller and larger ranges in the focal regions in the Northeast Honshu Arc.