Did you seriously think we’d stop tank experiments with only 2-layer systems? Nooo!

Today, the plan was to set up a continuous stratification, which I have been planning to do for many years. After fiddling with the setup all morning (do you have any idea how many fittings on all kinds of hoses are needed to get that to work well?), reality set in and we ended up doing a quasi-continuous stratification, i.e. 12 density layers dyed in 6 different colors*.

And this is what it looks like when you tow a mountain through that stratification (and try to ignore the excited audience being reflected in the tank): Still very nice lee waves and surprisingly little turbulence!

*We set up the tank to contain the same amount of salt as our 2-layer system yesterday, so instead of one big density jump from about 1000g/l to 1026g/l, this now happened in 5 smaller, more or less regular, jumps. And here is how we did it in the end: Two large reservoirs (unfortunately of different diameters), one containing freshwater, the other one filled up to the same height, containing as much salt as we had in our experiment yesterday. Now the height of the reservoirs was divided in 12 equal dzs, and for each dz that went out of the “freshwater” tank into the experimental tank, we added salt water of the same dz to the “freshwater” tank, which thus continued to increase in salinity. The water that we mixed that way went through a hose and entered the experimental tank through the bottom of the tank through a hole over which we had put the mountain (to contain mixing to a small volume and also so we didn’t have to watch water shooting out of that hole in our nice stratification). So as the water we added became increasingly dense, it nicely layered itself underneath the other water in the tank. And we just had to add more and more dye for the color gradient. Easy peasy :-)