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  • WHERE I WORK

Engineering a dream workspace

A sediment scientist rebuilt his entire lab to model how water shapes underwater canyons.
  1. Kendall Powell

    1. Kendall Powell is a freelance writer in Boulder, Colorado.

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Steven Lai at his lab at National Cheng Kung University

Steven Yueh Jen Lai examines a small-scale submarine underwater braiding-system experiment in his lab in the Department of Hydraulic and Ocean Engineering at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. Credit: Joe Russo for Nature

In my lab, we study the evolution of underwater landscapes. We look at density currents that plunge into an ocean or reservoir, and how sediment and water interact to shape the evolution of deltas, channels and canyons. These kinds of powerful currents occur in extreme events — such as floods or typhoons — and often are too hard to measure from a ship. But we can easily reproduce them here in my lab, using sand and coloured-water flows in a tank.

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Nature 575, 558 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03537-w

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