As I mentioned yesterday, I recently contributed to a teacher training on Lotseninsel, a tiny island on the Baltic Sea coast. The training was run by the Ozean:Labor of the Kieler Forschungswerkstatt, and we spent Friday to Sunday there. I’m going to show you some impressions of that weekend here.

At first, it did not look promising:

We had to pack A LOT of equipment on a small boat in pouring rain to bring everything over to the island.

After unpacking all that stuff, we went to test some instrumentation in the pouring rain. This is our cute ROV:

In the evening, when all the teachers had arrived, we started with the workshops and continued until late in the night. Below you see two groups of teachers working on 3×3 m stretches of the beach, collecting plastic to map the pollution of the beach.

The next day, the group was split up in two parallel groups. One doing stuff like this:

 

The other group, in which I was involved, doing stuff like this:

Obviously we had to do the melting ice cube experiment in a workshop on ocean physics!

But Johanna and Dennis did tons of other cool stuff, too, like for example this demonstration of salt inflow events into the Baltic Sea:

And again, the second time that same workshop was run in the afternoon for the second group of teachers. Amazing how quickly the weather changed!

 

But of course our group also did some field work: Water sampling and then analysing nutrients, salinity, oxygen concentration…

The next day, I got to see my first fish dissection. I know why I studied physics…

I am not showing you the gory pics here because that’s not what we do on this blog ;-)

Also really cool: Those are baleens, those filters that whales use! Never touched them before.

But we also got some time to enjoy the weather and play with our equipment: Those are Jeannine, Dennis and Johanna, who I had the pleasure to work with. It was great fun!

Even though the amazing weather only lasted for a short while, this is them arriving back on the main land with the last of three tours to shuttle everything back…

But I had a great weekend! And if you haven’t yet, go back and look at the lighthouse on Lotseninsel. I could spend years there, taking pictures from different angles and in different weathers… So pretty :-)