Related papers: Salt polygons and porous media convection
Salt playas with their tessellated surface of polygonal salt ridges are beautiful and intriguing, but the scientific community lacks a realistic and physically meaningful model that thoroughly explains their formation. In this work, we…
When corroding or otherwise aggressive particles are incident on a surface, pits can form. For example, under certain circumstances rock surfaces that are exposed to salts can form regular tessellating patterns of pits known as "tafoni". We…
Dry lakes covered with a salt crust organised into beautifully patterned networks of narrow ridges are common in arid regions. Here, we consider the initial instability and the ultimate fate of buoyancy-driven convection that could lead to…
Fluids subject to both thermal and compositional variations can undergo doubly diffusive convection when these properties both affect the fluid density and diffuse at different rates. In natural doubly diffusive convection, the gradients of…
On Mars, fields of sand dunes contrast with the general cratered, rocky terrain commonly seen from orbit. Near the equator, in Gale Crater, images from the rover, Curiosity, also reveal order on smaller scales: ripples on dunes, and ground…
We report a novel and spectacular instability of a fluid surface in a rotating system. In a flow driven by rotating the bottom plate of a partially filled, stationary cylindrical container, the shape of the free surface can spontaneously…
Sand patches are one of the precursors to early-stage protodunes and occur widely in both desert and coastal aeolian environments. Here we show field evidence of a mechanism to explain the initiation of sand patches on non-erodible…
Granular media such as sand and sugar are ubiquitous in nature and industry but are less well understood than fluids or solids. We consider the behavior of rapid granular flows where the transfer of momenta by collisions dominates. The…
Surface granulation of the Sun is primarily a consequence of thermal transport in the outer 1 % of the radius. Its typical scale of about 1 - 2 Mm is set by the balance between convection, free-streaming radiation, and the strong density…
Numerous land and space-based observations have established that Saturn has a persistent hexagonal flow pattern near its north pole. While observations abound, the physics behind its formation is still uncertain. Although several…
Plato envisioned Earth's building blocks as cubes, a shape rarely found in nature. The solar system is littered, however, with distorted polyhedra -- shards of rock and ice produced by ubiquitous fragmentation. We apply the theory of convex…
This article introduces a new geophysical theory, in the form of a single simple partial integro-differential equation, to explain how frictional abrasion alone of a stone on a planar beach can lead to the oval shapes observed empirically.…
We report here on a laboratory-scale experiment which reproduces a rich variety of natural patterns with few control parameters. In particular, we focus on intriguing rhomboid structures often found on sandy shores and flats. We show that…
A drop of aqueous potato starch gel with a certain mole fraction of NaCl, when dried on a glass slide, exhibits strong segregation and intricate pattern formation phenomena. The salt forms radial dendritic crystalline aggregates near the…
The self-amplifying creeping of salts can produce striking macroscopic structures, such as desert roses in arid regions and salt pillars near saline lakes. While these formations are visually remarkable, salt crystallization, often seen as…
The Sun is a non-equilibrium dissipative system subjected to an energy flow which originates in its core. Convective overshooting motions create temperature and velocity structures which show a temporal and spatial evolution. As a result,…
When particles settle through a stable temperature or salinity gradient they can drive an instability known as sedimentary fingering convection. This phenomenon is thought to occur beneath sediment-rich river plumes in lakes and oceans, in…
We report the first successful simulation of spontaneous formation of surface magnetic structures from a large-scale dynamo by strongly-stratified thermal convection in Cartesian geometry. The large-scale dynamo observed in our…
The dissolution of rocks by rainfall commonly generates streamwise parallel channels, yet the occurrence of these natural patterns remains to be understood. Here, we report the emergence in the laboratory of a streamwise dissolution pattern…
Dune fields are commonly associated with periodic patterns that are among the most recognizable landscapes on Earth and other planetary bodies. However, in zones of limited sediment supply, where periodic dunes elongate and align in the…