Turbulence and diffusion: fossil turbulence

Abstract

Fossil turbulence processes are central to turbulence, turbulent mixing, and turbulent diffusion in the ocean and atmosphere, in astrophysics and cosmology, and in most other natural flows. George Gamov suggested in 1954 that galaxies might be fossils of primordial turbulence produced by the Big Bang. John Woods showed that breaking internal waves on horizontal dye sheets in the interior of the stratified ocean form highly persistent remnants of these turbulent events, which he called fossil turbulence. The dark mixing paradox of the ocean refers to undetected mixing that must exist somewhere to explain why oceanic scalar fields like temperature and salinity are so well mixed, just as the dark matter paradox of galaxies refers to undetected matter that must exist to explain why rotating galaxies don't fly apart by centrifugal forces. Both paradoxes result from sampling techniques that fail to account for the extreme intermittency of random variables involved in self-similar, nonlinear, cascades over a wide range of scales; turbulent vorticity for dark mixing, and accreting small-planetary-mass MACHO number density for dark matter.