Vanishing Distance Phenomena and the Geometric Approach to SQG

In this article we study the induced geodesic distance of fractional order Sobolev metrics on the groups of (volume preserving) diffeomorphisms and symplectomorphisms. The interest in these geometries is fueled by the observation that they allow for a geometric interpretation for prominent partial differential equations in the field of fluid dynamics. These include in particular the modified Constantin-Lax-Majda and surface quasi-geostrophic equations. The main result of this article shows that both of these equations stem from a Riemannian metric with vanishing geodesic distance.