Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
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)
A Fluidic Space Telescope
A telescope’s resolution is set by the size of its reflective surface. Our largest space telescope, JWST, has a 6.5-meter reflector, the largest we could manage given manufacturing constraints and the need to launch it in a rocket. To reach even larger sizes, researchers are considering a new type of reflector: one made of liquid.…
Mirabilite Mounds at Great Salt Lake
In cold weather, a new geological feature has shown up at Utah’s Great Salt Lake in the last decade. These salty mirabilite mounds form terraced crystals that resemble Yellowstone’s Mammoth Hot Springs. Mirabilite is hydrated sodium sulfate (as opposed to the sodium chloride of table salt). The structures form when upwelling spring water partially dissolves…
Droplets Can Climb Sugar Fibers
In nature, droplets and fibers can meet on a spider’s web, on fur, or on a dew-gathering cactus. Here, researchers explore what happens when the droplet can dissolve the fiber it’s suspended on. As the authors note, a lumberjack who cuts the branch they sit on makes a fatal choice. The droplet sees a different…
Inside the LA Aquaduct
In the early twentieth century, Los Angeles had capital and political willpower, but not water. So it built an engineering marvel, the LA Aquaduct, to guide water from the Sierra Nevadas down to the growing city. Grady gets into the literal (and figurative) ups and downs of the project in this Practical Engineering video. Although…