Posted on 28 February 2011 at 09:50h

As the snow melts streams of water start to appear everywhere. This is nothing surprising so the roads here have very good drainage. Sometimes you can be driving along a road with water falls crashing down on one side and the fjord on the other, it's unbelievable how so much water can be directed under the road, I guess the amount of water in a waterfall looks much more than it really is. The two streams in the photo are not quite so impressive and how these are directed under the road is quite believable but they are interesting all the same. It's difficult to see in the photo after falling in a continuous stream the water breaks up into individual droplets. In really life this is easy to see but in the photo the droplets have become blurred so the stream looks continuous all the way down, however if you look closely you can see that at the top of the stream you can't see the background through the stream since the light is

refracted by the water however at the bottom of the stream you can since the stream is now made of droplets. If you look at the enlarged portion to the right maybe you can see what I mean. this in itself is interesting but it was the way the water turns from being continuous to droplets that I was most interested in. What seems to happen is that the water is accelerating so the stream gets thinner as it falls until it gets so thin that it forms drops. Hmm, that doesn't make a great deal of sense but it's a start. There seems to be a minimum "continuous stream" thickness, why do drops form when the stream gets thin? How is the rate of flow related to the distance the water falls before turning into drops?