Whirlpool

Corte Madera Creek (where we see it) is tidal, so sometimes there is a lot of water and sometimes the creek is very shallow.  There are a few pools on the other side of the bike path and they are connected to the creek by culverts under the path.  Last week the tide was going out as we walked the path and saw this whirlpool being created by water draining  the pool through a narrow culvert.  I've always thought that drains in the northern hemisphere flowed in one direction and below the equator in another.  Both Hans and Dick said this is called the 'Coriolis effect'.  However, an article on Wikipedia says that is probably not the case.  If you care to study this, here is the (part of) the article.

Draining in bathtubs and toilets

Coriolis rotation can conceivably play a role on scales as small as a bathtub. It is a commonly held myth that the every-day rotation of a bathtub or toilet vortex is due to whether one is in the northern or southern hemisphere. An article in Nature, by Ascher Shapiro, describes an experiment in which all other forces to the system are removed by filling a 6 ft. tank with water and allowing it to settle for 24 hrs (to remove any internal velocity), in a room where the temperature has stabilized (temperature differences in the room can introduce forces inside the fluid). The drain plug is then very slowly removed, and tiny pieces of floating wood are used to observe rotation. During the first 12 to 15 mins, no rotation is observed. Then, a vortex appears and consistently begins to rotate in a counter-clockwise direction (the experiment was performed in the Northern hemisphere, in Boston, MA). This is repeated and the results averaged to make sure the effect is real. The Coriolis effect does indeed play a role in vortex rotation for draining liquids that have come to rest for a long time. ["Bath-Tub Vortex", Nature. Dec 15th, 1962. Vol 195, No. 4859, p. 1080-1081]

In reality, this experiment shows that the Coriolis effect is a few orders of magnitude smaller than various random influences on drain direction, such as the geometry of the container and the direction in which water was initially added to it. In the above experiment, if the water settles for 2 hrs or less (instead of 24), then the vortex can be seen to rotate in either direction. Most toilets flush in only one direction, because the toilet water flows into the bowl at an angle. If water shot into the basin from the opposite direction, the water would spin in the opposite direction.


The idea that toilets and bathtubs drain differently in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres has been popularized by several television programs, including The Simpsons episode "Bart vs. Australia" and the The X-Files episode "Die Hand Die Verletzt."Several science broadcasts and publications, including at least one college-level physics textbook, have also stated this. Some sources that incorrectly attribute draining direction to the Coriolis force also get the direction wrong, claiming that water would turn clockwise into drains in the Northern Hemisphere.


The Rossby number can also tell us about the bathtub. If the length scale of the tub is about L = 1 m, and the water moves towards the drain at about U = 60 cm/s, then the Rossby number is about 6 000. Thus, the bathtub is, in terms of scales, much like a game of catch, and rotation is unlikely to be important.