Hydrodynamic-driven morphological patterns in glacial and karst environments
Event details
| Date | 02.10.2012 |
| Hour | 16:15 › 17:15 |
| Speaker | Dr Carlo Camporeale, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Torino (IT) |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Glaciers and caves are fascinating environments representing the last frontiers of the Earth exploration. Although glacial and karst environments could appear very different to a first view, the variety of patterns that they exhibit can be analyzed from a unified perspective with the same mathematical framework. Indeed, in both cases water is able to shape formidabile structures with several geometrical and dynamical similarities: for instance, icicles and ice-ripples, i.e. regular surface undulations carved by the action of a thin water film flowing on the ice, look like crenulations on the surface of stalactites and stalagmites, namely ripplelike structures with a subcentimetric wavelength. Likewise, scallops are equally visible on the walls of englacial conduits and subterranean channels in carbonate aquifer. The reason of such similarities lays in the fact that both kinds of processes belong to the class of water-induced morphodynamic phenomena, where a deformable boundary is subjected to the transport processes driven by hydrodynamics. The only difference is that water uses two different tools in chiseling the two boundaries: thermodynamics and geochemistry, respectively. In this presentation we will focus on open-channel systems, where the free surface plays a key role, and other resemblances arise with other well-known morphodynamic phenomena occurring in rivers.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
- This event is internal
Organizer
- IIE
Contact
- Professor Paolo Perona, AHEAD