All living beings and forces leave their mark on the Earth and the Universe. These marks, or "scratches," can be large or small, and they can fade away with time or last for eternity. Some scratches create wounds, while others heal. The "scratches" of great people like Tagore and Einstein are time-transgressive. They all leave a long-lasting impact on the world.

In the end, all of us leave our own scratches on the Earth and the Universe. Some of these scratches will be small and insignificant, while others will be large and meaningful. But all of them are a part of our collective history.

The scratches on Earth

Geological scratches on the other hand have a name called Slickenlines. They work as very good indicators of slip on a fault plane. Geologists have used these lines for decades to identify the movement of the rock block along a fault. We, a group of researchers at Jadavpur University and IIEST in India trying to associate these lines with domains of seismic slips during an earthquake event. Our idea demonstrates the fault plane as a heterogeneous slip zones. These zones are distributed on the rupture plane either as isolated patches or connected patches of slips. Depending upon this heterogeneous distribution of slip, the plane develops heterogeneity in terms of their roughness. Our study quantifies this degree of roughness in both 1D and 2D space in terms of Fractional Dimension or Fractal Dimension (D) using image processing techniques in MATLAB.