Crumple Theory

What do a sheet of paper being crushed into a ball and tossed into a wastebasket, the front end of a car deforming in a crash, and the Earth's crust gradually forming mountains over millions of years all have in common? They're all undergoing a physical process called crumpling, which occurs when a relatively thin sheet of material — one with a thickness that's much less than its length or width — has to fit into a smaller area.
And while it's easy to imagine crumpling as mere desultory disarray, scientists who've studied crumpling have discovered that it's anything but that. To the contrary, crumpling turns out to be a predictable, reproducible process governed by mathematics. The latest breakthrough in our understanding of crumpling is a paper recently published in Nature Communications, in which researchers describe a physical model for what happens when thin sheets are crumpled, unfolded and recrumpled.
Crumple Theory: We Can Learn a Lot From How Paper Crumples