C. Lautensack, A. Särkkä, J. Freitag, K. Schladitz

• This paper introduces methods for the detection of anisotropies which are caused by compression of regular three-dimensional point patterns. Isotropy tests based on directional summary statistics and estimators for the compression factor are developed. These allow not only for the detection of anisotropies but also for the estimation of their strength. Using simulated data the power of the methods and the dependence of the power on the intensity, the degree of regularity, and the compression strength are studied. The motivation of this paper is the investigation of anisotropies in the structure of polar ice. Therefore, our methods are applied to the point patterns of centres of air pores extracted from tomographic images of ice cores. This way the presence of anisotropies in the ice caused by the compression of the ice sheet as well as an increase of their strength with increasing depth are shown.