Volcanoes seem to be a common topic these days. Yesterday Nautilus published a great piece by Aatish Bhatia on the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, which tore the island apart and unleashed Keep reading
Month: December 2024
Pyroclastic Flow
Saturday morning Japan’s Mount Ontake erupted unexpectedly, sending a pyroclastic flow streaming down the mountain. Many, though sadly not all, of the volcano’s hikers and visitors survived the eruption. Pyroclastic Keep reading
200k Followers!
Exciting milestone: 200,000 Tumblr followers! What a great early birthday present. Thank you to everyone who follows, shares, asks questions, and submits topics. FYFD wouldn’t be what it is today Keep reading
Freediving
The freediving del Rosario brothers have created a real treat with this underwater film. There are no computer-generated special effects, just some clever tricks with camera angles, perspective, and buoyancy. Keep reading
Saturnian Auroras
Earth is not the only planet in our solar system with auroras. As the solar wind–a stream of rarefied plasma from our sun–blows through the solar system, it interacts with Keep reading
City Winds Simulated
Anyone who has spent much time in an urban environment is familiar with the gusty turbulence that can be generated by steady winds interacting with tall buildings. To the atmospheric Keep reading
The Chelyabinsk Meteor
In February 2013 a meteor streaked across the Russian sky and burst in midair near Chelyabinsk. A recent Physics Today article summarizes what scientists have pieced together about the meteor, Keep reading
Turning Into 2D
UCLA Spinlab has another great video demonstrating the effects of rotation on a fluid. In a non-rotating fluid, flow over an obstacle is typically three-dimensional, with flow moving over as Keep reading
Transonic Flow
In the transonic speed regime the overall speed of an airplane is less than Mach 1 but some parts of the flow around the aircraft break the speed of sound. Keep reading
Volcanic Vortex
This infrared image shows a kilometer-high volcanic vortex swirling over the Bardarbunga eruption. The bright red at the bottom is lava escaping the fissure, whereas the yellow and white regions Keep reading