Surfer and photographer Tim McKenna lives in the village of Teahupo’o on Tahiti’s southeastern coast. The area’s shallow coral reef system creates some of the world’s biggest barreling waves, which attract surfers from around the world. McKenna captures the majestic power of these surges in these black-and-white photographs; you can find more of his work on his website and Instagram. (Image credit: T. McKenna; via Colossal)
So many natural processes take place right in front of us, but they’re too small and too fast to see. Here, the Beauty of Science team puts some of those processes — crystallizing solids, nucleating bubbles, and more — front and center. The shapes and colors draw you in, inviting you to engage with science we see daily but rarely appreciate. (Video and image credit: Beauty of Science)
In this ASMR video, black ink diffuses in water. When the video starts, the ink is so diffuse that it’s not apparent the video is playing backward. It’s only as specific structures — things like Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities, plumes, and jets — coalesce from the background that we recognize the time reversal. Though it’s probably unintentional, this makes for a neat, subtle commentary on the nature of isotropic turbulence. (Video and image credit: Wryfield Lab)
In “Starlit,” filmmaker Roman de Giuli leverages paint, ink, water, and oil to create astronomical views. Colorful droplets spin past like neon exoplanets. Shards of glitter form comets. Satellite droplets become moons about their larger sibling. (Video and image credit: R. de Giuli)
A surfer duck-dives beneath a passing wave in this image from photographer John Barton. I always love seeing big waves from this underwater perspective. The turbulent surf looks like storm clouds, and sometimes you see features that are invisible from the surface. Barton’s shot captures the dichotomy of serenity and chaos in the breaking surf. (Image credit: J. Barton/OPOTY; via Colossal)
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 a speaker cone, which is appropriate since ferrofluids are frequently used in speakers to provide cooling and enhance performance. (Video and image credit: Susi Sie)
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 Phil Hart used 5 main cameras, 4 refractors, 2 laptops, and plenty of digital image processing to capture some incredible details of the plasma and hot gases dancing along the sun’s magnetic field lines. You can learn about the awesome effort behind this image — and see more awesome photos from the eclipse — at his site. (Image credit: P. Hart; via APOD)
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 on the size and speed of different falling dyes. (Video and image credit: C. Dormoy)
Turbulent flows feature swirling eddies over a range of sizes — the larger the size range, the higher the Reynolds number. In this satellite image, sediment highlights these eddies in shades of turquoise, showing off the complexity of the flows created where rivers, ocean, and tides meet. The eddies we see here stretch from kilometers in width down to a handful of meters, but the flow’s turbulence persists down to millimeter-scales before viscosity damps it out. (Image credit: L. Dauphin; via NASA Earth Observatory)
