Reply To: Proliferation?

[jamesr]

AaronB wrote: Here’s a general idea that might inspire some thoughts. The atmosphere has a jet stream, as do the oceans, and plasma filaments are little jet streams. They pretty much appear anywhere there is a big potential difference and a path of least resistance through a viscous material. For example, I propose that there are jet streams going through the magma under the earth’s crust, and that could drive continental drift. Where else might they pop up?

Jet streams are different in nature to ocean currents and flow along plasma filaments. As far as plasma phenomena go, “zonal flows” in tokamaks are the closest analogy. In the atmosphere of earth (or other planets such as Jupiter or Saturn) they come about by the Hadley cell flow up from the equator then flowing north (or south in southern hemisphere) to the tropics where they cool and fall. This combines with a second cell & third cell from the tropics to the pole – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jetcrosssection.jpg. These north-south eddies interact with the Earth’s rotation to create flows perpendicular to the main eddy rotation. At low altitude they are the trade winds, at high altitude the jet streams.

In tokamaks the turbulent flow outwards from the core (& perpendicular to the magnetic field) creates motion in the third, poloidal, direction perpendicular to both the B-field and the pressure gradient know as zonal flows, which can help in forming barriers to the flow of heat out of the tokamak.

The main point it jet stream type flows are perpendicular to the forcing potential (temperature gradient from equator to pole in this case), not down the potential as normal flows are.