Evolution of salt-fingers and transition to chaos: Flow visualization

When temperature and salinity are increased in the upper layer of a gravita tionally stable two-layered fluid, the interface becomes unstable and so-ca lled salt-fingers are generated. Via flow-visualization, we investigated th e long time evolution of salt fingers. This study explains the mechanism fo r generating large-scale convective cells at the final stage of the fingeri ng instability, implicated phenomenologically as an onset to turbulence in the evolution of salt fingers.