With some help from Physics Girl and her friends, Grant Sanderson at 3Blue1Brown has a nice video introduction to turbulence, complete with neat homemade laser-sheet illuminations of turbulent flows. Grant Keep reading
Tag: eddies
Can Zooplankton Mix Oceans?
Krill and other tiny marine zooplankton make daily migrations to and from the ocean surface. Previously, models of ocean mixing ignored these migrations; these animals are tiny, researchers argued, so Keep reading
Sedimentary Swirls
Sediment swirls in Bear Lake caught the eye of an astronaut aboard the International Space Station last year. Bear Lake is situated in the Rocky Mountains, on the Idaho-Utah border. Keep reading
Watching the Boundary Layer Go By
In experiments, it can be difficult to track individual fluid structures as they flow downstream. Here researchers capture this spatial development by towing a 5-meter flat plate past a stationary Keep reading
Mixing the Southern Ocean
Motion in the ocean is driven by many factors, including temperature, salinity, geography, and atmospheric interactions. While global currents dictate much of the large-scale motion, it’s sometimes the smaller scales Keep reading
Visualizing Ocean Currents
Researchers used computational models of ocean currents to produce this video visualizing worldwide ocean surface currents from June 2005 through December 2007. Dark patterns under the ocean are representative of Keep reading
Surf’s Up
Diffusion of ink in water + Lego minifigs = an awesome example of fluid mechanics as art. (Photo credit: Alberto Seveso; via io9; thanks to Jennifer for the link!)
Flow in Urban Areas
While we typically think about boundary layers as a small region near the surface of an object–be it airplane, golf ball, or engine wall–boundary layers can be enormous, like the Keep reading
Oceanic Swirls
Mixing of surface waters with deeper ocean currents brings together the minerals and nutrients used by phytoplankton, resulting in gorgeous swirls of color in the ocean. These phytoplankton blooms are Keep reading
Stirred Up Sediment
Swirls of blue in the Great Lakes mark locations of recent autumn storms whose winds have stirred up sediment in the lakes. The silt and quartz sand acts as a Keep reading