When winds flow past a solitary peak, like an island in the ocean, they’re disrupted into a series of counter-rotating curls. That’s what we see here stretching to the southwest of Madeira Island. The official name for this flow is a von Karman vortex street, and it can be found anywhere from a soap film to a starship. (Image credit: J. Stevens; via NASA Earth Observatory)
Curls Past the Canaries
