Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
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Bardarbunga Eruption
I thought I was done with volcanoes for this week, but DJI’s aerial footage from Iceland’s Bardarbunga eruption is too fantastic not to share. The eruption is over a month old now and more than 25,000 earthquakes have been registered in Iceland since this eruption began. The lava field covers more than 46 square kilometers, and experts remain…
Undulatus Asperatus
This surrealistic timelapse doesn’t show an ocean in the sky. These are undulatus asperatus clouds rolling over Lincoln, Nebraska. Also known simply as asperatus, this cloud formation has been proposed as but not yet recognized as a distinctive cloud type. Their speed is much slower than shown in the animation, but the wave-like motion is…
Krakatoa
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 a sound so loud it was heard more than 4800 km away: The British ship Norham Castle was 40 miles from Krakatoa at the time…
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 flows are fast-moving turbulent and often super-heated clouds filled with ash and poisonous gases. They can reach speeds of 700 kph and temperatures of 1000…
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 without all of you.
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. The end result is slightly surrealistic and captures some of the fluid beauty of the ocean. And don’t miss the excellent bubble ring vortices. (Video…
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 the magnetic fields of other planets as well as our own. Saturn’s magnetic field second only to Jupiter’s in strength. This strong magnetosphere deflects many of…
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 boundary layer–the first few hundred meters of atmosphere just above the ground–cities, forests, and other terrain changes act like sudden patches of roughness that disturb…
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, from its origins to its demise. The whole article is well worth reading. Here’s a peek: The Chelyabinsk asteroid first felt the presence of Earth’s…
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 well as around the object. But in a steadily rotating fluid, as shown in the latter half of the video, the flow only moves around…