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Laminar flow on a beach
The tumbling ocean is a turbulent place - but not always. Right at the shore, when the waves are small and the tide is low, you can watch a very good approximation to laminar flow: sheets of water appear to slide across one another like giant pieces of glass. In this example I snapped in Swanage a few years ago, a fast incoming wave (1) is moving over another wave that has already slowed down (2), while a third layer of water (3) is sliding down the beach, underneath, in the opposite direction. The waves involved here are only inches high at most, so there's very little water mixing between the layers.
Our images are published under a Creative Commons Licence (see opposite) and are free for noncommercial use. We also license our images for commercial use. Please contact us directly via our website for more details.
Laminar flow on a beach
The tumbling ocean is a turbulent place - but not always. Right at the shore, when the waves are small and the tide is low, you can watch a very good approximation to laminar flow: sheets of water appear to slide across one another like giant pieces of glass. In this example I snapped in Swanage a few years ago, a fast incoming wave (1) is moving over another wave that has already slowed down (2), while a third layer of water (3) is sliding down the beach, underneath, in the opposite direction. The waves involved here are only inches high at most, so there's very little water mixing between the layers.
Our images are published under a Creative Commons Licence (see opposite) and are free for noncommercial use. We also license our images for commercial use. Please contact us directly via our website for more details.