Eli5: Why do waterfalls not have laminar flow?
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Water is flowing over debris like rocks and broken tree limbs. These obstacles create turbulence in the water with nothing to smooth out the waterflow.
Some do, at least it first. The farther the water falls the more that air resistance slows the outside part, breakthe stream up into droplets.
Falling water is going way too fast and usually too big to be laminar.
Without diving down a giant rabbit hole of fluid mechanics, in order to have laminar flow you need to be going really slowly or have very small dimensions (relative to the viscocity of the fluid…here comes the rabbit hole). It’s essentially impossible to get consistent laminar flow with large (wide, deep) fast flows. Anything more than a few cm across or more than a few m/s in speed, for water, is going to go turbulent at the slightest provocation.
With *very* careful engineering you can delay the onset of turbulence for a little while but your average waterfall is random crap that nature threw together and not engineered for laminar flow at all.
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