Curvilinear patterns of oceanic fracture zones

The goal of this paper is to determine the geometry of the Earth's oceanic fracture zones (FZs) on a worldwide scale and to describe their geometrical patterns. For this, 214 FZs were digitized in 11 digital images (Warnken, 2001). The curvatures of each FZ were then measured and categorized. The overall result is that the majority of FZs (89.3%) share the same geometrical behavior referred to as "curve pattern" in this work. On the Northern hemisphere, most of the FZs have their first curve pointing to the right and on the Southern hemisphere to the left, when looking from a FZ's starting point on an ocean ridge axis towards its end point. Exceptions to this mirror-like curve pattern are either located within 10 degree latitude of the Earth's equator or seem to be influenced by other factors, such as proximity to a continental Crust or truncation by lineaments. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.