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  • Marshland Wave Damping

    Marshland Wave Damping

    Coastal marshes are a critical natural defense against flooding. The flexible plants of the marsh both slow the water’s current and help damp waves. As a result of that hydrodynamic dissipation, marshes help protect against erosion and reduce the magnitude of flooding events. But coastal managers looking to maintain or improve their marshes in order to mitigate climate-change-driven storms need to be able to predict what level of vegetation they need.

    To that end, a team of researchers has built a new model to better capture the flow effects of marsh grasses. Building from an individual, flexible plant (as opposed to a rigid cylinder, as grass is often represented), the authors constructed a model able to predict wave dissipation for many marsh configurations, which should help better predict the infrastructure changes needed in different coastal regions. (Image credit: T. Marquis; research credit: X. Zhang and H. Nepf; via APS Physics)

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    Siberia’s Lena River Delta

    As rivers near the sea, they often slow down and branch out, creating intricate paths through delta wetlands. This video explores the Arctic’s largest river delta, that of the Lena River in Siberia, during its spring and summer flood season. The images were all taken by satellite and processed with color enhancements to highlight patterns in the water. Although this is not quite how the area would appear by eye, all of the visible patterns are real. (Image credit: N. Kuring/NASA’s Ocean Color Web; video credit: K. Hansen; via NASA Earth Observatory)

    Enhanced color satellite image of the Lena River delta in Siberia.
  • Cloud-Making Waves

    Cloud-Making Waves

    As sea ice disappears in the Arctic Ocean, it leaves behind higher waves on the open water. These large waves help inject sea salt and organic matter into the atmosphere, where they can serve as nucleation sites for ice crystals. A recent field expedition in the Chukchi Sea observed high concentrations of organic particulates in the air and more ice-producing clouds during periods of high wave action. So, oddly enough, the loss of sea ice may lead to more cloud cover and precipitation in the Arctic (though the effect is likely not strong enough to entirely mitigate the effects of ice loss). It’s another example of the intricate and complex connections between ice, ocean, and atmosphere in the Arctic climate. (Image credit: A. Antas-Bergkvist; research credit: J. Inoue et al.; via Gizmodo)

  • Hagfish Slime

    Hagfish Slime

    The eel-like hagfish is a superpowered escape artist, thanks to its slime. When threatened, the hagfish releases long protein-rich threads that, when combined with turbulent sea water, unravel to form large volumes of viscoelastic slime that clog the gills of its predators. A new study shows that larger hagfish produce longer and thicker threads in their slime, enabling them to escape larger predators than their smaller brethren can.

    The properties of hagfish slime are tuned for defense. When stretched, the long protein threads resist, making the slime more viscous. Since most fish use suction methods to catch prey, that means a predator attacking a hagfish will quickly exacerbate its slimy problems. But the hagfish itself can easily escape its slime by tying itself in a knot. The threads inside the slime collapse when sheared, so the knot-tying of the hagfish slips the slime right off. (Image credit: T. Winegard; research credit: Y. Zeng et al.; via Ars Technica; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)

  • Turbulent Puffs

    Turbulent Puffs

    When a burst of air gets expelled into still surroundings — like when a person coughs — it forms a turbulent puff like the one seen here. Puffs can be surprisingly long-lasting, though these miniature clouds slow down and expand over time. How they behave is critical to understanding the spread of pollution as well as how respiratory illnesses like COVID-19 travel. In this study, researchers found that buoyancy is also a critical factor. When the puff is warmer than its surroundings, it rises higher, lasts longer, and travels further. That might help explain why respiratory illnesses like the flu spread more readily in the winter than in warmer months. (Image and research credit: A. Mazzino and M. Rosti; via Physics World; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)

  • Bullseye

    Bullseye

    The Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands began erupting in mid-September 2021. This satellite image, captured October 1st, shows a peculiar bullseye-like cloud over the volcano. Hot water vapor and exhaust gases rose rapidly from the erupting volcano until colliding with a drier, warmer air layer at an altitude of 5.3 kilometers. The warm upper layer, known as a temperature inversion, prevented the volcanic gases from rising any further, so they instead spread horizontally. The outflow from the volcano varies and is non-uniform, and its fluctuations generated gravity waves that are visible here as the expanding rings of clouds. (Image credit: L. Dauphin; via NASA Earth Observatory)

  • Modelling Volcanic Bombs

    Modelling Volcanic Bombs

    When magma meets water on its journey to the surface, the two form a large, partially molten chunk known as a volcanic bomb. As you would expect from their name, these bombs can often be explosive, either in the air or upon impact. But a surprising number of these bombs never explode. Since catching volcanic bombs in action is far too dangerous, researchers modeled them instead to determine what makes a dud.

    Examples of porous volcanic bombs.

    The type of volcanic bomb they were most interested in comes from Surtseyan eruptions, where the bombs travel through shallow sea or lake water, collecting moisture along the way. When the water reaches the molten interior of the volcanic bomb, it flashes into steam. That’s where the pressure to explode the bombs comes from. But the team found that the bombs are also extremely porous, thanks to bubbles created as the magma depressurizes on its trip to the surface. If the bomb is porous enough, steam escapes the rock before it can build to explosive pressures. (Image credit: top – NASA, others – E. Greenbank et al.; research credit: E. Greenbank et al.; via NYTimes; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)

  • The Acoustics of Stonehenge

    The Acoustics of Stonehenge

    Stonehenge has long been an astronomical wonder, but did you know it’s an aural wonder as well? A team of acoustic engineers and an archaeologist constructed and tested a 1:12 scale model of the monument as it existed around 2200 B.C. Their model included 157 3D-printed stones (which took about nine months to print!), carefully engineered to reflect ultrasonic frequencies the way the full-size Stonehenge reflects frequencies in our auditory range. (Using the higher frequency sound at a smaller physical scale allows engineers to match the physics of the real henge.)

    The team found that the stones of the henge amplified sound by about 4 decibels, enough to make a speaker’s voice easy to hear, even when facing a different direction. The structure also provided some reverberation that would enhance musical instruments or singing. Stonehenge had reverberation levels similar to a modern-day large movie theater, which is absolutely incredible for a prehistoric structure constructed in the open air.

    For more interesting details on the model’s construction and testing, check out this article at Physics Today. (Image and research credit: T. Cox et al.)

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    Filming a Calving Glacier

    The San Rafael Glacier, one of the fastest calving glaciers in the world, sits above a fjord in Patagonia. About 10 – 25 meters of the glacier is lost to calving every day. Here, filmmakers take you behind-the-scenes to show what it takes to film in such a remote, unpredictable, and dangerous environment. (Image and video credit: BBC Earth)

  • Fractal Frost

    Fractal Frost

    As nightly temperatures drop in the northern latitudes, many of us are beginning to wake up to frosty patterns on leaves, windows, and cars. Frost‘s spread is a complex dance between evaporation and nucleation, as seen in this recent study.

    Here, researchers watched frost grow on a surface covered in 30-micrometer-wide micropillars. The pillars serve as anchor points for droplets, making frosting easier to observe. At low humidity levels (Image 1), droplets evaporate so quickly that frost regions remain isolated and do not interact. At high humidity levels (Image 3), on the other hand, the droplets evaporate so slowly that they’re able to poach water vapor from their neighbors to form frost spikes. When a spike touches another droplet, it freezes the region almost instantly. As a result, the frost spreads quickly and covers nearly every part of the surface. At intermediate humidity levels (Image 2), though, this frost chain reaction and evaporation compete, causing the frost to grow in fractals. (Image and research credit: L. Hauer et al.; via APS Physics)

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