The shallow-water equations cease to apply inside the narrow nose, so a gravity-current front condition is needed to relate its speed to the depth immediately behind it. Use
where is the front Froude number; the ideal deep-ambient von Kármán condition gives .
In a uniform axisymmetric box model, conservation of contaminated volume gives
The total nondimensional heat content is , while cooling acts over area , so
Eliminating time and taking the initial release radius as negligible gives
Spreading stops as , at
Hence the maximum covered area is

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