Internal waves are all around us, influencing everything from the patterns formed in clouds to the heat radiating off a black tar road. In the ocean, these waves play a crucial role in regulating heat, nutrients, and gases like carbon dioxide. However, oceanographers still don't fully understand this phenomenon. An estimated 2 TW of unaccounted power is needed to support interior ocean mixing, with roughly half believed to come from tidal flow over underwater topography which generates internal gravity waves that radiate energy throughout the ocean. Tracking the journey from tidal generation to dissipation is challenging because the energy cascade spans vast scales and involves complex nonlinear processes.In this video, we used Background Oriented Schlieren (BOS) to capture and visualize internal waves and turbulence in two tanks-one just over 10 gallons, the other nearly 10,000 gallons. From the data, we calculated the displacement, pressure, and velocity of the water to map how energy moves and mixes. In the small tank, viscosity dominates, limiting the development of wave-wave interactions and turbulence. In the large tank, however, these interactions are enhanced, and turbulence dominates the visualization. These BOS findings produced at vastly different scales bring us closer to unraveling the mystery of ocean mixing.This research was supported by NSF award OCE-2049213 (MOMS).
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