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Fluid dynamics is changing our world

A special magazine about the challenging world of fluid dynamics

How the ocean’s turbulence affects our climate

The ice age cometh, or not

Is Europe on the brink of a second ice age? In recent years, some have speculated that climate change may affect the Gulf Stream, a powerful oceanic current which transports heat from the tropics past the eastern shore of the USA and into the North Sea. Without it, many scientists believe, Western and Northern Europe would be much cooler.

Fluid dynamics plays a key part in understanding the Gulf Stream. Because of differences in temperature and salinity, in some places water is denser (and therefore heavier) than in others. In parts of the North Atlantic, large quantities of dense surface water plunge into deep sea basins, triggering the Gulf Stream.

Large-scale melting of glaciers would reduce local salinity levels and could upset this process, slowing down the Gulf Stream or pushing it much further south. However, oceanic systems are complex and nobody knows for sure how realistic or far-reaching these effects would be.

A better understanding of turbulence would help to clear up the picture. At two Max Planck Institutes, in Göttingen (Germany) and Twente (The Netherlands), researchers are closely examining the

mechanisms affecting turbulence, using unique experimental facilities and numerical simulations on supercomputers.

One major discovery they made is the phenomenon of “ultimate turbulence”. Whereas normally turbulence develops gradually, data and theory suggests that at a certain point fluids can enter another state of turbulence, in which heat and mass transport is greatly enhanced. Other research has focused on the effect of rotation on turbulent flow. They found that as a body of fluid’s rotation increases, heat transport initially also dramatically increases, followed by a sharp drop.

Such findings are an important step towards a better understanding of geophysical systems, such as our atmosphere, the earth’s interior, and our oceans. The ice age cometh? Perhaps not…

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German physicist Detlef Lohse is a full Professor at the University of Twente. He is one of the world’s foremost authorities on fluid dynamics. In 2005, he received the prestigious Spinoza Prize for his work on sonoluminescence, in 2012 he received the George Batchelor Prize of IUTAM and in 2017 the Fluid Dynamcis Prize of the American Physical Society. Mass heat transfer in fully turbulent flow is one of the focus areas in his current research.

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