  In viscous withdrawal, a converging flow imposed in an upper layer of viscous
liquid entrains liquid from a lower, stably stratified layer. Using the idea
that a thin tendril is entrained by a local straining flow, we propose a
scaling law for the volume flux of liquid entrained from miscible liquid
layers. A long-wavelength model including only local information about the
withdrawal flow is degenerate, with multiple tendril solutions for one
withdrawal condition. Including information about the global geometry of the
withdrawal flow removes the degeneracy while introducing only a logarithmic
dependence on the global flow parameters into the scaling law.
