Scalloped iceberg sculptures occur due to the weirdness of water

Enlarge (credit: Scott Weady)

You would think that understanding something as common as melting ice would be relatively easy. But water is a peculiar substance, and that makes it very hard to predict how ice will melt. A lot of that unpredictability has been attributed to water flowing around the ice (as seen in sea currents flowing around icebergs, for example).

Still, understanding melting is required to better predict things like the breakup of sea ice. So a group of physicists turned the fluid dynamics up to 11 and have shown that melting ice is weird, even when there are no currents.

It only does that to annoy you

The rules that govern the Universe are relatively simple. However, to ensure that the Universe is sufficiently maddening, those simple rules were crafted to produce fluid dynamics and water. Fluid dynamics is the study of how fluids flow.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments