Whirlpool

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Information about Whirlpool

This article is about the water movement. For other uses, see Whirlpool (disambiguation).

Saltstraumen whirlpool

A whirlpool in a glass of water

A whirlpool is a large, swirling body of water produced by ocean tides. In popular imagination, but only rarely in reality, they can have the dangerous effect of destroying boats. In the 8th century, Paul the Deacon, who had lived among the Belgii, described tidal bores and the maelstrom for a Mediterranean audience, unused to such violent tidal surges:

Not very far from this shore... toward the western side, on which the ocean main lies open without end, is that very deep whirlpool of waters which we call by its familiar name "the navel of the sea." This is said to suck in the waves and spew them forth again twice every day...

They say there is another whirlpool of this kind between the island of Britain and the province of Galicia, and with this fact the coasts of the Seine region and of Aquitaine agree, for they are filled twice a day with such sudden inundations that any one who may by chance be found only a little inward from the shore can hardly get away.

I have heard a certain high nobleman of the Gauls relating that a number of ships, shattered at first by a tempest, were afterwards devoured by this same Charybdis. And when one only out of all the men who had been in these ships, still breathing, swam over the waves, while the rest were dying, he came, swept by the force of the receding waters, up to the edge of that most frightful abyss. And when now he beheld yawning before him the deep chaos whose end he could not see, and half dead from very fear, expected to be hurled into it, suddenly in a way that he could not have hoped he was cast upon a certain rock and sat him down. — Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards, i.6

The vast majority of whirlpools are not very powerful. More powerful ones are more properly termed maelstroms. Vortex is the proper term for any whirlpool that has a downdraft. (Technically, these approximate to a 'free vortex', in which the tangential velocity (v) increases as the centre line is approached, so that the angular momentum (rv) is constant).

Very small whirlpools can easily be seen when a bath or a sink is draining, but these are produced in a very different manner from those in nature. Smaller whirlpools also appear at the base of many waterfalls. In the case of powerful waterfalls, like Niagara Falls, these whirlpools can be quite strong.

The most powerful whirlpools are created in narrow shallow straits with fast flowing water. The Moskstraumen off the Lofoten islands in Norway is generally considered the world's most powerful whirlpool, along with Saltstraumen which reaches speeds of 40 km/h. The Meilnort has been measured with a speed of the water current of up to 27.7 km/h, and the Old Sow has been measured with a speed of up to 27.6 km/h . The Naruto whirlpool has a speed of 20 km/h. Powerful whirlpools have killed unlucky seafarers, but their power tends to be exaggerated by laymen. There are virtually no stories of large ships ever being sucked into a whirlpool. Tales like those by Paul the Deacon, Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe are entirely fictional. The closest equivalent might have been the short-lived whirlpool that sucked in a portion of Lake Peigneur in New Iberia, Louisiana after a drilling mishap in 1980. This was not a naturally-occurring whirlpool, but a man-made disaster caused by breaking through the roof of a salt mine. The lake then behaved like a gigantic bathtub being drained, until the mine filled and the water levels equalized. Although some boats and semi trailers were pulled into it in the classic whirlpool stereotype, no human lives were lost.

Famous whirlpools

Corryvreckan off the coast of Scotland
Moskstraumen, the original maelstrom off the coast of Norway
Saltstraumen in Norway
Old Sow between New Brunswick and Maine
Naruto whirlpool between Naruto in Tokushima and Awaji Island in Hyōgo, Japan
Garofalo off the coast of Italy
Charybdis from the Odyssey

External links

Whirlpool may refer to:

Whirlpool, a circular movement of water
Whirlpool Corporation, a house-hold appliance manufacturer
Whirlpool (website), an Australian website for broadband users
Whirlpool (cryptography), a cryptographic hash function

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Water is a common chemical substance that is essential to all known forms of life.^[1] In typical usage, water refers only to its liquid form or state, but the substance also has a solid state, ice, and a gaseous state, water vapor.
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Tides are the cyclic rising and falling of Earth's ocean surface caused by the tidal forces of the Moon and the Sun acting on the oceans. More generally, tidal phenomena can occur in any object that is subjected to a gravitational field that varies in time and space, such as the
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A boat is a watercraft designed to float or plane on, and provide transport over, water. Usually this water will be inland (lakes) or in protected coastal areas. However, boats such as the whaleboat were historically designed to be operated from a ship in an offshore environment.
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Paul the Deacon (c. 720 – 13 April probably 799), also known as Paulus Diaconus, Warnefred and Cassinensis, (i.e. "of Monte Cassino"), was a Benedictine monk and historian of the Lombards.
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A tidal bore (or just bore, or eagre) is a tidal phenomenon in which the leading edge of the incoming tide forms a wave (or waves) of water that travel up a river or narrow bay against the direction of the current.
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A maelstrom (or malstrÃ¶m) is a very powerful whirlpool; a large, swirling body of water. The word was introduced from the Nordic form by Edgar Allan Poe in his story A Descent into the Maelstrom (1841).
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Comunidad AutÃ³noma de Galicia / Comunidade AutÃ³noma de Galicia

Flag Coat of arms

Capital Santiago de Compostela
Official language(s) Galician and Spanish
Area
– Total
– % of Spain Ranked 7th
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Gaul (Latin: Gallia) was the name given, in ancient times, to the region of Western Europe comprising present-day northern Italy, France, Belgium, western Switzerland and the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the west bank of
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In Greek mythology, Charybdis or Kharybdis (IPA: /kəˈrɪbdɨs/; in Greek, Χάρυβδις) was a sea monster, daughter of Poseidon and Gaia.
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Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment or VORTEX, is a field project that seeks to understand how a tornado is produced by deploying around 18 vehicles that are equipped with customized instruments used to measure and analyze the weather around a
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An updraft or downdraft (air pocket) is the vertical movement of air as a weather related phenomenon. Commonly, one of two forces causes the air to move. Localized regions of warm or cool air will exhibit vertical movement.
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A waterfall is usually a geological formation resulting from water, often in the form of a stream, flowing over an erosion-resistant rock formation that forms a sudden break in elevation or nickpoint.
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Niagara Falls

The American Falls, Bridal Veil Falls, and Horseshoe Falls.
Location Niagara Falls (Ontario & New York)
Coordinates Coordinates:
Type Segmented Block
Total height 167 ft (51 m)
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Moskstraumen (popularly known as the Maelstrom) is a system of tidal eddies and whirlpools, one of the strongest in the world, that forms in a strait adjacent to the Lofoten archipelago, Norway.
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Lofoten is an archipelago and a traditional district in the county of Nordland, Norway. Though lying within the Arctic Circle, the archipelago experiences one of the world's largest elevated temperature anomalies relative to its high latitude.
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Motto

Royal: Alt for Norge ("Everything for Norway")
1814 Eidsvoll oath: Enige og tro til Dovre faller
("United and faithful until the mountains of Dovre crumble")

Anthem
Ja, vi elsker

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Saltstraumen is a sound with a strong tidal current located in Nordland some 30 km east of the city of BodÃ¸, Norway. It is the strongest tidal current in the world. Up to 400 million m³ of seawater forces its way through a 3 km long and 150 m wide strait every six hours, with
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Old Sow is the name of the largest tidal whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere located off the southwestern shore of Deer Island, New Brunswick between that island and Moose Island, the principal island of Eastport, Maine.
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Naruto whirlpool.]] The Naruto whirlpool (鳴門の渦潮,
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Jules Verne

Jules Verne. Photo by FÃ©lix Nadar.
Born: January 8 1828(1828--)
Nantes, France
Died: March 24 1905 (aged 77)
Amiens, France
Occupation: Novelist
Nationality: French
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Edgar Allan Poe

This daguerreotype of Poe was taken in 1848 when he was 39, a year before his death.
Born: January 19 1809(1809--)
Boston, Massachusetts U.S.
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Location Louisiana
Coordinates Coordinates:

Primary sources estimated 8.
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The Gulf of Corryvreckan (from the Gaelic Coirebhreacain meaning "cauldron of the speckled seas" or "cauldron of the plaid"), also called the Strait of Corryvreckan
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Motto
Nemo me impune lacessit (Latin)
"No one provokes me with impunity"
"Cha togar m'fhearg gun dioladh"
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Motto

Royal: Alt for Norge ("Everything for Norway")
1814 Eidsvoll oath: Enige og tro til Dovre faller
("United and faithful until the mountains of Dovre crumble")