FRACTAL ASPECTS OF THE SWISS LANDSCAPE

We systematically examine the Swiss landscape in the search of the self-affine fractal scaling. We find for intermediate horizontal length scale range (250 m - 5 km) a rather well-defined self-affine roughening exponent of about 0.57, averaged over the whole Swiss territory. This value is surprisingly close to that found in other mountain ranges around the world, in spite of their very different geomorphological appearances. For smaller and larger length scales, more complex behaviors than the simple scaling are encountered.