Morphological patterns in glacial, karst and alluvial environments: a hydrodynamic stability approach
Morphological instabilities are ubiquitous in nature. They often result from a mutual interaction between a flow (usually an open-channel flow) and a movable interface driven by several physical processes, such as phase change, mechanical erosion and chemical precipitation. The mathematical analysis of these complex boundary-value problems allows us to unify apparently very different patterns such as icicles and ice-ripples, crenulations on the surface of stalactites and stalagmites, scallops on the walls of englacial conduits and subterranean channels in carbonate aquifers. The reason of such similarities is that both kinds of processes belong to a class of water-induced morphodynamic phenomena, where a deformable boundary is subjected to hydrodynamic-driven transport driven by thermodynamic and geochemical processes. In this presentation I will focus on pattern formation in open-channel systems, where the free surface plays a key role in stability analysis, and important resemblances arise with other well-known morphodynamic phenomena occurring in alluvial rivers.
Relevant References
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Camporeale C. & Ridolfi L. (2012) Hydrodynamic-Driven Stability Analysis of Morphological Patterns on Stalactites and Implications for Cave Paleoflow Reconstructions, Phys. Rev. Lett., 108 (23)
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