Direct Numerical Simulation of 3D Salt Fingers: From Secondary Instability to Chaotic Convection

Abstract

The amplification and equilibration of three-dimensional salt fingers in unbounded uniform vertical gradients of temperature and salinity is studied with a Direct Numerical Simulation in a triply periodic computational domain. A fluid dynamics video of the simulation shows that the secondary instability of the fastest growing square-planform finger mode is a combination of the well-known vertical shear instability of two-dimensional fingers [Holyer, 1984] and a new horizontal shear mode.