{"id":244494,"date":"2026-09-25T01:31:38","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T06:31:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/whirlpool-in-a-water-tank-reveals-long-predicted-wave-turbulence"},"modified":"2026-09-25T01:31:38","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T06:31:38","slug":"whirlpool-in-a-water-tank-reveals-long-predicted-wave-turbulence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/whirlpool-in-a-water-tank-reveals-long-predicted-wave-turbulence","title":{"rendered":"Whirlpool in a water tank reveals long-predicted wave turbulence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/whirlpool-in-a-water-tank-reveals-long-predicted-wave-turbulence2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When water drains from a bathtub, a whirlpool often forms above the drain, and its narrow core can start to wobble and twist. For almost 150 years, physicists have predicted that these wobbles can become turbulent, passing energy from large ripples down to ever smaller ones. Until now, however, this \u201cKelvin-wave turbulence\u201d had never been seen directly in an experiment.<\/p>\n<p>In new research published in <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.aps.org\/prl\/abstract\/10.1103\/t3bt-m431\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Physical Review Letters<\/i><\/a>, a team led by Eric Falcon at Universit\u00e9 Paris Cit\u00e9 has observed the effect using a carefully controlled whirlpool in a tank of water.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When water drains from a bathtub, a whirlpool often forms above the drain, and its narrow core can start to wobble and twist. For almost 150 years, physicists have predicted that these wobbles can become turbulent, passing energy from large ripples down to ever smaller ones. Until now, however, this \u201cKelvin-wave turbulence\u201d had never been [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}