Glacial Blues

Meltwater braids like a river delta in this gorgeous image from photographer Stuart Chape. It earned the Silver distinction from the World Nature Photography Awards in their “Planet Earth’s landscapes and environments” category. Water takes tortuous paths like these as it tries to balance the local incline, erosion, deposition, and flow rate. (Image credit: S. Chape/WNPA; via Colossal)

I've been playing with a very simple approach to meandering paths. I'm not sure if I'm getting anywhere with these, but I thought I'd post some of the tests so far.

The problem with the 2D idea is that the paths will easily wander off the screen. So I thought I'd put them on a spherical surface to contain them. It turned out this isn't quite trivial, and I had to rethink what directions and turns actually mean there. It all came down to the Non-Euclidean nature of the sphere. A straight-line direction there means a great circle, but no two great circles can be parallel. So directions and positions are rather closely linked. This is in contrast to Euclidean geometry, where you can go from any point into any direction.

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Cutting Out Canyons

Over the millennia, the Colorado River has carved some of the deepest and most dramatic canyons on our planet. This astronaut photo shows the river near its dam at Lake Powell. The strip of white edging the lake is the “bathtub ring” that shows how the water level has varied over the years. The deep canyons — over 400 meters from the Horn in the center of the photo to the river beside it — throw shadows across the landscape. To reach these depths, the Colorado River incised its path into bedrock that was tectonically uplifted. (Image credit: NASA; via NASA Earth Observatory)

#fluidDynamics #geology #geophysics #meander #physics #planetaryScience #riverBend #rivers #science