The Origin of Nanoscopic Grooving on
Vesicle Walls in Submarine Basaltic Glass:
Implications for Nanotechnology
Figure 6
Quantitative scaling analysis of a representative region of dendritic nanogrooves (viscous fingering tree). (a) Overview of the selected region of dendritic nanogrooves, isolated from one of the viscous fingering trees in the growth modelling study of Figure 5. This region was selected as representative because it occurs in a flat region near the center of the vesicle and shows development of a significantly large region of dendritic nanogrooves that were not affected by nearby sulphide spherules or neighbouring starting viscous fingers during pattern formation. The size of the tree was also constrained by the growth model in Figure 5 (i.e., this portion of the tree comprises a total of 2.5m of growth starting from the selected region of the primary stem—colours are the same as for Figure 5). (b) Pixelated image of the viscous fingering tree shown in (a). This image was used to determine the fractal dimension of the viscous fingering trees (dendritic nanogrooves) observed in this study. The method used to determine the fractal dimension is after [25], which involves measuring the apparent length of the perimeter of the pixelated image numerous times systematically with a ruler of increasing length (from one pixel to 25 pixels in length). Determination of the apparent length of the perimeter with a ruler of 15 pixels in length is shown to illustrate how these measurements were made. (c) Determination of the fractal dimension () from the apparent length measurements of the perimeter ( = apparent length in units of ; = length of the ruler in pixels).
