Front-spotting in muddy waters

On a recent flight from Hamburg to London City Airport, I ended up on one of the tiniest planes I’ve ever been on. Which meant that we flew super low, I took tons of pictures out of a not-very-clean window, and all my pictures have at least one propeller blade in them.

But look at what we saw!

For example in the picture below, a plume of muddy water coming from some canal into a river (and I should probably know where this is, but I have no idea. Somewhere between Hamburg and London?). I’m not sure whether the inflowing water itself was muddy to begin with, but I would guess that it is stirring up mud from the bottom of the river since it seems to be low tide and the inflowing water is maybe moving a lot faster than the water in the river itself?

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Closer to England we flew across this wind farm, where turbines have mud stripes in their lee. Also pretty interesting. Maybe they change direction with tides?

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And then coming to the mouth of the River Thames, there is quite a clear front between outflow and muddy North Sea water.

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Going upstream on the River Thames, boats stir up a lot of mud!

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So you can clearly see where they went for a pretty long time.

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On this flight, I sat next to a professional photographer who rolled his eyes at me taking pictures pretty much non-stop. And yes, they might not be the best quality. But at least you see what I saw, right?

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