Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Oil-Slicked Bubble Bursts
When bubbles at the surface of the ocean pop, they can send up a spray of tiny droplets that carry salt, biomass, microplastics, and other contaminants into the atmosphere. Teratons of such materials enter the atmosphere from the ocean each year. To better understand how contaminants can cross from the ocean to the atmosphere, researchers…
Damping a Skyscraper
Wind forces on a skyscraper can set it swaying, so engineers design dampers to stop the motion and keep users comfortable. Some buildings use suspended solid mass dampers to counter a building’s motion, but others take a liquid approach. Whether by shifting water through specially shaped chambers or by sloshing it back and forth in…
A New Plasma Wave for Jupiter
Jupiter‘s North Pole has a powerful magnetic field combined with plasma that has unusually low electron densities. This combination, researchers found, gives rise to a new type of plasma wave. Ions in a magnetic field typically move parallel to magnetic field lines in Langmuir waves and perpendicularly to the field lines in Alfvén waves — with…
Thawing Out
Lake Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, can almost completely freeze over in winter. In this satellite image of the lake in March 2025, about a third of the lake remains ice-covered, while sediment — resuspended by wind and currents — and phytoplankton swirl in the ice-free zone. In recent decades, scientists discovered that…
“Vorticity 6”
It’s time for another storm-chasing timelapse from photographer Mike Olbinski! “Vorticity 6” focuses on supercell thunderstorms and their tornadoes. There’s billowing turbulent convection, undulating asperitas, bulging mammatus, microbursts, and more. There’s nothing like timelapse to highlight the growth, rotation, and shear involved in these storms. (Video and image credit: M. Olbinski)
Earth’s Core is Leaking
In Earth’s primordial days, liquid iron fell through the ball of magma that was our planet, collecting elements–like ruthenium-100–that are attracted to iron. All of that material ended up in Earth’s outer core, a dense sea of liquid metal that geoscientists assumed was unable to cross into the lighter mantle. But recent observations suggest instead…
How Particles Affect Melting Ice
When ice melts in salt water, there’s an upward flow along the ice caused by the difference in density. But most ice in nature is not purely water. What happens when there are particles trapped in the ice? That’s the question this video asks. The answer turns out to be relatively complex, but the researchers…
Double Detonation in Type 1a Supernovae
Type 1a supernovae are agreed to be explosions of white dwarf stars, the remains of stars similar in mass to our Sun. They’re thought to be triggered when extra mass — from a nearby companion star, for example — triggers a runaway fusion reaction in their carbon and oxygen, elements that white dwarfs generally don’t…
Baltic Bloom
June and July brings blooming phytoplankton to the Baltic Sea, seen here in late July 2025. On-the-water measurements show that much of this bloom was cyanobacteria, an ancient type of organism among the first to process carbon dioxide into oxygen. These organisms thrive in nutrient- and nitrogen-rich waters. Here, they mark out the tides and…
Salty Swirls
Flamingos soar over swirls of salt and algae in a lake in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Shaped by winds, currents, physics, and chemistry these eddies reflect the motion of the water, evaporation patterns, and more. Without more information, it’s hard to say exactly what shapes the pattern, but it does appear reminiscent of a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability…