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Search results for: “art”

  • Burning Oil Spills With Fire Whirls

    Burning Oil Spills With Fire Whirls

    Though they are relatively infrequent, large marine oil spills, like 2010’s Deepwater Horizon, are devastating and incredibly difficult to clean up. In many locations, the “best” option for responding to such disasters is burning off the oil before it can absorb enough water to sink. But these floating fires leave behind unburned oil and produce soot. To enhance the burn, researchers are looking at the possibility of triggering large-scale fire whirls.

    Often seen in wildfires, these fire vortices are intense and localized. Researchers made a more than 5-meter tall version in these experiments by arranging three walls that spun up the in-flowing air. The fire whirl sat above a pool of water topped in a layer of oil that served as the whirl’s fuel.

    Within the whirl, the fire’s burn rate was 40% higher than a typical pool fire, and soot production was 40% lower–showing that fire whirls can burn cleaner. But the whirls are more finicky to start and maintain. It’s not yet clear whether such intense whirls are possible in the chaotic conditions on the ocean. (Research and image credit: W. Cui et al.; via Eos)

    View of a large-scale fire whirl experiment built around an oil spill on a pool.
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  • The Disappearing Great Salt Lake

    The Disappearing Great Salt Lake

    Since 1989, Utah’s Great Salt Lake has lost some 70% of its surface area. The exposed lakebed left behind is a source of toxic dust that gets lifted into the air. Researchers are trying to understand what water sources exist beneath the lake and whether they might save the saline lake and its ecosystem from disappearing entirely.

    A recent study pinpoints underground water by measuring the electrical resistance between electrodes placed meters apart in the ground (photo above). Because salty water is more electrically conductive than fresh water, the researchers can distinguish between them. So far, they’ve found quite a lot of fresh water, sometimes only a couple meters below the surface. But those patches are often quite close to saline water, too.

    The group also described to Eos that they found mounds of invasive reeds lying atop concentrations of fresh water. The invasive species seems to be sucking up water that would otherwise feed back into the lake or support native plants that provide habitat to native birds. (Image credit: M. Thorne; research credit: M. Jacketta et al.; via Eos)

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  • Swirls Above the Southern Ocean

    Swirls Above the Southern Ocean

    In the Southern Ocean, obstacles are sparse. But the ice-cloaked volcano of Peter I Island is tall enough at over 1600 meters to disrupt the wind. At steady wind speeds between about 18 to 54 kilometers per hour, flowing past the island creates vortices that shed from one side and then the other. The result is a von Karman vortex street like the one seen here, flowing toward the upper right.

    The overlaid ripple structures in the cloud layer are reminiscent of gravity waves. Perhaps, the wind’s passage made some lee waves that the vortices distorted? (Image credit: M. Garrison; via NASA Earth Observatory)

    A von Karman vortex street stretches downstream from Peter I Island.
  • A Special Trio of Clouds

    A Special Trio of Clouds

    Off the coast of Alaska, March 19th, 2026 featured a trio of fascinating clouds. Southwest of Anchorage, a cyclonic polar low twisted up from cold polar air centered over warmer waters. This particular storm boasted tropical-storm-force winds and thunderstorms in its center.

    Further west, long cloud streets formed parallel to the wind as cold dry air picked up moisture from warmer polar waters. And, finally, in the bottom left of the image, alternating vortices swirl in the wake of a rocky island, forming a beautiful von Karman vortex street. (Image credit: M. Garrison/NASA Earth Observatory)

    A trio of atmospheric phenomena appear in this satellite image off Alaska: a polar low, cloud streets, and a von Karman vortex street.

  • Dropping Oobleck

    Dropping Oobleck

    Oobleck is a peculiar substance. Formed from a suspension of cornstarch particles in water, it can flow like a liquid at low shear rates or jam into a solid under impact. Here, researchers explore what happens to a droplet of oobleck impacting a surface. As they expected, the team found that dilute drops could spread like a normal liquid during impact (top), and denser suspensions could impact like a solid would (below). But at the right conditions, they found that cornstarch-rich droplets could show liquid-like behavior at high shear rates and transition to solid-like behavior once the shear rate slowed down. (Image and research credit: A. Mobaseri et al.; via APS)

    An oobleck drop impacts and acts mostly solid.
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    The Teton Dam Failure

    Engineering failures always leave us with lessons learned. The failure of Teton Dam in 1976 triggered an overhaul in how we manage dam construction and regulation. As Grady describes in this Practical Engineering video, the earthen dam was built with fundamental flaws that allowed water to carve pathways beneath and through the sediment meant to hold it. Although the dam cost $100 million to build, its failure cost the federal government over three times that in claims. (Video and image credit: Practical Engineering)

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  • Vanishing Spirits: Cognac

    Vanishing Spirits: Cognac

    Years ago, photographer Ernie Button discovered an intriguing stain left behind in his whiskey glass after the last drops evaporated. That discovery led both to beautiful images and an entire scientific paper analyzing how the alcohol, surfactants, and polymers in the whiskey combined to leave such a uniform stain. Over the years, Button continued investigating liquor stains, looking at gin, rice whisky, and aging effects. Here, he’s turned his lens to cognac, producing stains that look like oil slicks, aerial landscapes, and even cartoonish faces! (Image and submission credit: E. Button)

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  • Oyster Reefs Sequester Nitrogen

    Oyster Reefs Sequester Nitrogen

    The US eastern seaboard was once blanketed with oyster beds, but overharvesting, pollution, and habitat destruction decimated the population. As filter-feeders, oysters are naturally good at cleaning intertidal zones, and the reefs they build by cementing themselves to one another provide valuable habitat for many species of fish. A new study shows that oysters are even more economically valuable than we knew, thanks to their ability to sequester nitrogen.

    Agricultural and industrial run-off carries nitrates into the ocean in high concentrations that trigger deadly phytoplankton blooms, which choke off oxygen levels for larger species like fish. One way to reduce nitrogen levels in the water is denitrification, a process where microbes break down the nitrate into, among other things, inert nitrogen gas. The surface of oyster reefs is one place where this happens. But nitrates that evade these microbes can also get trapped and buried by a growing oyster reef.

    To understand how much nitrogen an oyster reef can bury, researchers studied cores removed from restored oyster beds. Below the top ten centimeters (where microbes do their denitrification), nitrogen levels in the oysters increased, with a square meter of oyster reef, on average, sequestering 6 grams of nitrogen per year, comparable to the amount that microbes removed. But some oyster reefs outperformed others. In particular, intertidal flat reefs–which grow faster–buried more than twice the nitrogen of subtidal reefs.

    The team estimated that, in North Carolina’s Carteret County, oyster reefs sequester some 120,000 kilograms of nitrogen annually, at an economic value of over $3 million. (Image credit: J. Andrews/UNC-Chapel Hill; research credit: A. Smiley et al.; via Eos)

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  • Brushstrokes in Blue

    Brushstrokes in Blue

    In early February 2026, cold weather swept into southern Florida. The cold fronts churned up sediment and cooled shallow waters, making them denser than the warmer waters of the open ocean. That caused the cooled water to sink off the continental shelf, carrying bright sediment with it. The satellite images of swirling sediment remind me of Impressionist paintings. (Image credit: M. Garrison; via NASA Earth Observatory)

    Zoomed in satellite image showing sediment eddies swept into the ocean.
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  • Shocked Jets

    Shocked Jets

    Breaking a jet of liquid into droplets lies at the heart of many industrial processes: spray painting, fuel injection, and asthma inhalers, to name a few. Here, researchers are looking at a different method of breaking up a liquid jet: shooting a shock wave along its length. The poster shows five different snapshots of the jet’s response. There are, variously, mists of fine droplets, wavy distortions of the jet, sheets, ligaments, and droplets of many sizes. (Image credit: S. Rao et al.)

    Research poster showing black and white images of liquid jets after a shockwave passed along the length of each jet.
    Research poster showing black and white images of liquid jets after a shock wave passed along the length of each jet.

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