Previous Work 



Although a great deal of quantitative geomorphology has beea doae 

 on terrestrial landscape, as well as on lunar and planetary landscapes, 

 relatively little quantitative study has been done on sea-floor morphol- 

 ogy. Only since the late 1950' s, when acoustic sonar systems became 

 commercially available, has It been possible to attempt such statistical 

 studies of bathymetry. The continuing refinement of sonar and naviga- 

 tional systems has given recent Investigators even greater opportunities 

 for success. Equally Important has been the development of large dig- 

 ital computers and efficient statistical algorithms such as the fast 

 Fourier transform, which allow sophisticated statistical analyses on 

 large volumes of data, which were Impractical until recently. 



The work of previous Investigators is somewhat sparse and Inconsis- 

 tent, and is reviewed only briefly here. More Information Is given In 

 later sections as It becomes pertinent to various aspects of the study. 

 Some of the earliest studies were done by Agapova (1965), who generated 

 mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosls statistics from measurements of 

 slopes of a transect of the mld-Atlantlc ridge. Heezen and Holcombe 

 (1965) were able to describe physiographic provinces over a large por- 

 tion of the North Atlantic Ocean. After rejecting spectral and filter- 

 ing techniques, these authors developed a method of comparing the spac- 

 ing of adjacent peaks and troughs. In effect, the method calculates the 

 average distribution of slopes without regard to spatial frequency. 



Krause and Menard (1965) studied depth distributions from 15 pro- 

 files in the east Pacific Ocean and found them to be normally dlstrlb- 



