The non-smooth, jerky movements of microstructures under external forcing in minerals are explained by avalanche theory in this review. External stress or internal deformations by impurities and electric fields modify microstructures by typical pattern formations. Very common are the collapse of holes, the movement of twin boundaries and the crushing of biominerals. These three cases are used to demonstrate that they follow very similar time dependences, as predicted by avalanche theories. The experimental observation method described in this review is the acoustic emission spectroscopy (AE) although other methods are referenced. The overarching properties in these studies is that the probability to observe an avalanche jerk J is a power law distributed P(J) ~ J^−ε where ε is the energy exponent (in simple mean field theory: ε = 1.33 or ε = 1.66). This power law implies that the dynamic pattern formation covers a large range (several decades) of energies, lengths and times. Other scaling properties are briefly discussed. The generated patterns have high fractal dimensions and display great complexity.

在这篇综述中，雪崩理论解释了矿物在外力作用下的微观结构的非光滑，急促的运动。杂质和电场引起的外部应力或内部变形会通过典型的图案形成来改变微结构。非常普遍的是孔洞的坍塌，孪生边界的移动和生物矿物质的压碎。根据雪崩理论的预测，这三种情况用来证明它们遵循非常相似的时间依赖性。尽管引用了其他方法，但本评论中描述的实验观察方法是声发射光谱法（AE）。这些研究的总体特性是，观察到雪崩跳动J的概率是幂律分布P（J）  〜J^-ε其中ε是能量指数（在简单平均场论中：ε  = 1.33或ε  = 1.66）。该幂定律意味着动态模式的形成涵盖了很大范围（数十年）的能量，长度和时间。简要讨论了其他缩放属性。生成的图案具有高的分形维数，并且显示出极大的复杂性。