Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Ice Giant or Magma Ocean World?
Uranus and Neptune–known as our system’s ice giants–are our least explored planets. Both have received exactly one flyby, from the Voyager 2 spacecraft. The data from those flybys remain our primary source of knowledge about each planet. The traditional model for each planet’s interior (dating back to before the flybys) consists of three layers: a…
Giant Water Balloon to the Face
It’s the summertime, so Gav and Dan of the Slow Mo Guys are back to experimenting with giant water balloons. In this video, they send several careening down a slope into Dan’s face. Watching the balloons descend and pop is (unsurprisingly) my favorite part. It’s neat to see how the elasticity of the balloon acts…
Inside an Espresso Bed
When pulling a shot of espresso, there are complicated physics at play. The ground coffee is tamped into a puck-like bed of grains, through which high-temperature, high-pressure water is forced. Here, researchers used X-ray tomography to visualize how and when water moves through the bed, which affects how flavors extract. In a finely ground bed,…
Canyon Swirls
For much of the year, Cañon Fiord in the Canadian Arctic lies under ice and snow, but in the summer melt season, colors peek out. Here sea ice and sediment swirl in the fjord in eddies that are kilometers wide. The sediment is largely glacial flour–rock that’s been ground into dust by glaciers. It provides…
Múlajökull
Iceland’s Múlajökull glacier is prone to sudden surges, where rapid ice flow is interspersed between periods of quiescence or retreat. The isolated nature of the glacier and its marshy surroundings make approaching on foot almost impossible, but photographer Dani Guindo captured gorgeous aerial images of the glacier’s many rivulets ribboning about the landscape it’s carved.…
Convection Inside the Mantle
Most of what we know about Earth’s interior comes from observing how seismic waves–mostly from earthquakes–bounce around. As our observations have gotten better–more seisometers, better imaging techniques–scientists have identified two large anomalies sitting near the bottom of the mantle. Known as large low-velocity provinces, or LLVPs, these zones take up continent-sized areas beneath parts of…
Even Penguins Love Bubbles
Walter, a young African penguin at the New York Aquarium, loves soap bubbles. In fairness to Walter, so do most people I’ve met. There’s just something that feels a bit magical about these ephemeral rainbow spheres that pop at a (dry) touch. Bubbles owe their colors to thin film interference–the colors actually indicate how thick…
Where Waves Carry Plastics
The classic theory of steady wave motion predicts a phenomenon called Stokes drift, in which particles spread horizontally in the direction of wave travel. That means that something like microplastics will drift in the direction that waves are traveling. But in the real world, ocean waves aren’t quite so neat and unchanging. A new study…
Making Quieter Shock Waves
NASA’s X-59 aircraft is intended to demonstrate supersonic flight without the boom. Although it’s broken into supersonic speeds, we haven’t yet heard its “sonic thump” because, so far, it’s been accompanied by conventional supersonic aircraft, which are louder. The idea behind the long, skinny X-59 is to create weaker, widely-spaced shocks along the aircraft body.…
Pacific Surf
Life in Venice Beach lends itself to wave-watching, or so it seems for photographer Craig Hubbard. His portraits of waves and surfers are ethereal, every swell capped by a cloud-like swath of spray. Somehow, every photographer seems to capture breaking waves a little differently! (Image credit: C. Hubbard; via Colossal)