Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
- Profile
Gigantic Jets
Stormy skies feature much more than the forked cloud-to-ground lightning we’re used to seeing. This composite image shows a rare and recently-recognized type of lightning known as a gigantic jets. This type of lightning travels from the top of thunderclouds, around 16 km in altitude, up to the ionosphere at about 90 km. Their bottoms…
Curved Rocks Hit Harder
Intuition suggests that a flat rock will hit the water with greater force than a spherical one, and experiments uphold that. But a flat rock, interestingly, doesn’t produce the greatest impact force. Instead, it’s a slightly curved rock that experiences peak impact forces. Researchers found this happens because of the thin layer of air that…
“Plants That Explode”
We often think of plants as passive and stationary, but the truth is that some plants move faster than we can even see. In this “True Facts” video, Ze Frank takes a look at a whole host of fast-moving plants, including horsetail plant spores that walk and jump, trebuchet-like bunchberry dogwood, vortex-ring-shooting moss, and moisture-driven…
“Black”
In “Black,” filmmaker Susi Sie combines her visuals of shifting ferrofluids with the music and soundscape of Clemens Haas to create an ominous, almost claustrophobic vibe. With fast cuts and shallow focus, the sharpened points of the normal-field instability appear as flashes of brightness in the dark. At times, the liquid’s surface looks almost like…
Resolution Effects on Ocean Circulation
The Gulf Stream current carries warm, salty water from the Gulf of Mexico northeastward. In the North Atlantic, this water cools and sinks and drifts southwestward, emerging centuries later in the Southern Ocean. Known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), this circulation is critical, among other things, to Europe’s temperate climate. Since 1995, scientists…
Trapped in a Taylor Column
The world’s largest iceberg, A23a, is stuck. It’s not beached; there are a thousand meters or more of water beneath it. But thanks to a quirk of the Earth’s rotation, combined with underwater topology, A23a is stuck in place, spinning slowly for the foreseeable future. A23a is trapped in what’s known as a Taylor column,…
How a Storm Can Ruin Your Tea
Last November, a windstorm, known as Storm Ciarán in the U.K., blew through Europe with wind speeds as high as 130 kilometers per hour. All that wind came with a significant drop in atmospheric pressure. Researchers found that the pressure drop was large enough to lower the boiling point of water more than full 2…
The Solar Corona in Detail
The sun’s corona — its outer atmosphere — is usually impossible to see, since it’s far outshone by the rest of the sun. But during a total solar eclipse, the moon blocks out all but the vibrant, wispy corona. Getting a detailed image of the corona is tough; it’s constantly shifting. For this image, engineer…
“Aquakosmos – Ch. 2”
Colored inks bulge and billow around flowers in filmmaker Christopher Dormoy’s “Aquakosmos – Ch. 2”. Because ink is denser than the surrounding water, it sinks, forming mushroom-like shapes as the Rayleigh-Taylor instability takes over. One of the fun things about this particular video is that we see the Rayleigh-Taylor instability at many different sizes, depending…
Waves Lap on Titan’s Shores
Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, is the only other planetary body known to have liquid lakes, rivers, and seas at its surface. Whether those bodies — made up of hydrocarbons rather than water, like here on Earth — have waves is a matter of ongoing debate. What data we have from visiting spacecraft is inconclusive.…