Saturday, October 17, 2009

Energy in a Waterfall


When I was looking through pictures on my computer, this picture that I took from Yellowstone two summers ago caught my eye. Most people think of waterfalls as magnificent, but they don't even know why. Waterfalls are cool to look at because of the transfer of potential energy to kinetic energy and the force of weight that acts on the water. As the water falls over the edge, its weight pulls it down to the bottom. At the top, the water has both potential and kinetic energy, but at the bottom, its potential energy is zero since the potential energy that it had was converted into kinetic energy. Its kinetic energy of the waterfall is what makes it spray off the surface of the water at the bottom, as seen in the picture. Therefore, the higher up the waterfall is, the more kinetic energy it will have at the bottom, so that's why the water shoots back up pretty high at the bottom. Although the waterfall in my picture doesn't look very tall, it was extremely tall, which is why you see a significant amount of mist made by it and a rainbow.

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