Date/Time
Date(s) - 04/15/2025
9:00 am - 10:00 am
Location
HPNP 1404
Categories
Title
Fluid Mechanics of the Dead Sea: Rise of the Salt Giants
Eckart Meiburg, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering
University of California, Santa Barbara
Abstract
The environmental setting of the Dead Sea combines several aspects whose interplay creates flow phenomena and transport processes that cannot be observed anywhere else on Earth. As a terminal lake with a rapidly declining surface level, the Dead Sea has a salinity level that is close to saturation, so that the buoyancy-driven flows common in lakes are coupled with precipitation and dissolution, and large amounts of salt are being deposited year-round. This provides an opportunity to investigate the formation of “salt giants,” large-scale salt deposits that are observed to have formed in the earth’s crust around the world.
The Dead Sea is the only hypersaline lake deep enough to form a significant thermohaline stratification during the summer, which gives rise to descending supersaturated dissolved salt fingers that precipitate halite particles.
In contrast, during the winter the entire supersaturated, well-mixed water column produces halite. The rapid lake level decline of O (1m/year) exposes vast areas of newly formed beaches every year, which exhibit deep incisions from streams. Taken together, these phenomena provide insight into the enigmatic salt giants observed in the Earth’s geological record and offer lessons regarding the stability, erosion and protection of arid coastlines under sea level change.
Biography
Eckart Meiburg received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Karlsruhe in Germany, in 1986 After a postdoctoral stay at Stanford University, and faculty appointments at Brown University and the University of Southern California, he joined UC Santa Barbara in 2000, where he currently is a distinguished professor of Mechanical Engineering. He is a recipient of the NSFPresidential Young Investigator Award and the Humboldt Senior Research Award, a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a past chair of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society, and he serves as Associate Editor for Physical Review Fluids. His research interests lie in the general area of fluid dynamics and transport phenomena, with a focus on multiphase and environmental fluid mechanics.
