In most systems, they arise out of a forcing pressure that encounters some kind of resistance or shear factor, but the details vary depending on the particular context.
Although there may have been an earlier use of the term, it was used in 1987 specifically in connection with a model of the motion of a single bubble in a fluid subject to periodically driven pressure oscillations (Smereka, Birnir, and Banerjee, 1987).
There is extensive literature on nonlinear analysis of the dynamics of bubbles in liquids, with important contributions from Werner Lauterborn (1976).
This includes analysis of chaotic dynamics in an acoustic cavitation bubble field in a liquid (Lauterborn, Holzfuss, and Bilio, 1994).
Sarnobat et al.[1][2]) study the behavior of electrostatic fields on chaotic bubbling in attempt to control the chaos into a lower order periodicity.