Gathering oil after a spill is fiendishly difficult. Deploying booms to corral and soak up oil at the water surface only catches a fraction of the spill. A recent study Keep reading
Tag: turbulence
Salt Affects Particle Spreading
Microplastics are proliferating in our oceans (and everywhere else). This video takes a look at how salt and salinity gradients could affect the way plastics move. The researchers begin with Keep reading
Icelandic Flows
Known as “The Land of Fire and Ice,” Iceland has some of the most striking landscapes around. Photographer Jennifer Esseiva captures auroras, waterfalls, geysers, rivers, and more in this series Keep reading
Flooding the Mediterranean
Nearly 6 million years ago, the Mediterranean was cut off from the ocean and evaporated faster than rivers could replenish it. This created a salty desert that persisted until about Keep reading
Kolmogorov Turbulence
Turbulent flows are ubiquitous, but they’re also mindbogglingly complex: ever-changing in both time and space across length scales both large and small. To try to unravel this complexity, scientists use Keep reading
“Trinity”
Inspired by the film Oppenheimer, artist Thomas Blanchard created “Trinity,” a short film imagining a nuclear explosion with macro-scale fluid motion. There’s clever video editing and compositing in this video, but Keep reading
Visualizing Unstable Flames
Inside a combustion chamber, temperature fluctuations can cause sound waves that also disrupt the flow, in turn. This is called a thermoacoustic instability. In this video, researchers explore this process Keep reading
How CO2 Gets Into the Ocean
Our oceans absorb large amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Liquid water is quite good at dissolving carbon dioxide gas, which is why we have seltzer, beer, sodas, and other carbonated Keep reading
“Magic of the North”
Fires glow above and below in this award-winning image from photographer Josh Beames. In the foreground, lava from an Icelandic eruption spurts into the air and seeps across the landscape Keep reading
Soaring Through the Pillars of Creation
The Pillars of Creation are an iconic feature nestled within the Eagle Nebula. For decades, the public has admired Hubble’s images of this stellar nursery, and, in this video, we Keep reading