Gone is the regularity exhibited in the parallel rolls, with the fluid moving in continuous circular waves. Velocities and temperatures vary throughout the fluid. Some portions of it rise and fall faster than others. Everything about the system changes from one moment to the next. It's a crock pot of symmetry turned bubbly cauldron.
Color corresponds to temperature, increasing from violet to red.
Chaos is a realm beyond order, whose disorder has a recognizable pattern over time. Chaotic patterns are seen in everything from weather systems to cardiac activity at the cellular level. The new patterns revealed themselves when experimentalists, and later theorists, devised a means of enlarging the R-B cell, the enclosed setting in which the convection occurs and is observed. Previously, they could examine only a small piece of the convection system, which limited the extent to which pattern activity could evolve. It couldn't have been done without supercomputing.