Distality in Ordered Abelian Groups

We provide a characterization of distal ordered abelian groups: An ordered abelian group is distal if and only if, for each prime number $p$, the sizes of ribs with respect to the “valuation” ${\mathfrak{s}}_p$ are uniformly bounded. This generalizes the distality criterion for ordered abelian groups with finite spines given by Aschenbrenner, Chernikov, Gehret, and Ziegler.