Some seabirds, including gannets and boobies, feed by plunge diving. From high in the air, they fold their wings and dive like darts into the water, impacting at speeds around Keep reading
Tag: water entry
Curved Rocks Hit Harder
Intuition suggests that a flat rock will hit the water with greater force than a spherical one, and experiments uphold that. But a flat rock, interestingly, doesn’t produce the greatest Keep reading
Paris 2024: Diving
In competition diving, athletes chase a rip entry, the nearly splash-less dive that sounds like paper tearing. Part of a successful rip dive comes in the impact, where divers try Keep reading
Diving Together
Two spheres dropped into water next to one another form asymmetric cavities. A single ball’s cavity is perfectly symmetric, and so are two spheres’, provided they are far enough apart. Keep reading
Tokyo 2020: High-Dive Physics
In Olympic high-diving, athletes leap from a maximum of 10 meters above the water. Although the force of their water impact is substantial, it’s small enough that they can enter Keep reading
Brace For Impact
What happens in the moment before an object hits the water? That’s the question at the heart of a new study exploring how water deforms before an object’s impact. The Keep reading
The Two-Faced Splash
The way a sphere enters water depends on its size, speed, and surface properties. A hydrophilic (water-attracting) sphere behaves differently than a hydrophobic (water-repelling) one. But what happens when the Keep reading
Viscoplastic Drop Impact
There are many materials that don’t behave exactly as a fluid or a solid, instead displaying characteristics of both. In this video, we see drops of hair gel falling into Keep reading
Reducing the Force of Water Entry
As anyone who’s jumped off the high board can tell you, hitting the water involves a lot of force. That’s because any solid object entering the water has to accelerate Keep reading
Entrained
When an object hits water whether it draws air in with it depends on its shape, impact speed, and surface characteristics. In this experiment, though, there’s a bit of a Keep reading