The incident took place at Wiesenfeld on the East-West border in the East German province of Thuringia.
Wiesenfeld is a municipality in the district of Eichsfeld in Thuringia, Germany.
Bak, Tang and Wiesenfeld's 1987 paper linked together these factors: a simple cellular automaton was shown to produce several characteristic features observed in natural complexity (fractal geometry, 1/f noise and power laws) in a way that could be linked to critical-point phenomena.