Interference of waves plus a lot of sandbanks make for fun sudden appearances of crests out of nowhere!

Good morning!

Morning swim

Chilling with F.

Morning swim, best way to start the day! :)

Fascinating how these stripes are so coherent over such long distances & times!

Love the colors

Breakfast spot

Admiring the #langmuircirculation stripes that, according to to some people *coughcough, don’t exist…

Still windy

Oh hello little cute wave! So nice of you to join me on my morning dip!

I love all the small structures in the waves on windy days, where you can really see the water being affected by wind stress and it totally makes sense that there is a transfer of energy from the wind into pushing water & getting it in motion

Windy days separating sand grain sizes! The fine sand blows off the beach & gets deposited in ripples, the coarser sand and pebbles stay on the beach and also on some spots behind that slope, where also fallen twigs & other stuff are blown free from all the surrounding finer stuff.

Speaking of beach maintenance (or sand being blown away, but I saw in spring how a lot of new sand was being delivered to & spread on the beach, so that’s how my thought process went here): pretty impressive beach clean at 7am on a Sunday!

And yes, I have to photoshop foam stripes into at least one picture every couple of days to keep conspiracy theories alive, otherwise I’d be kicked out of my secret club #langmuircirculation

When waves run into very shallow water, at some point they start looking like pool noodles being pushed underneath a carpet. But I love how they act as lenses and let us see the seafloor so clearly!

I appreciate the dedication (demonstrated by the setup of this field teaching site) to focus an audience’s attention on a small area of the river so they can discuss specific wave phenomena (a few seconds after the picture was taken for example the rowboat’s wake and eddies produced by the oars) and don’t get distracted by all the other #wavewatching going on.

Swimming buddy is chill as always. And making these cute capillary waves whenever there is suddenly tension on the string. But I cannot let him float away, sorry…

Sunny morning swim

I love water

How fascinating the transition between being able to look into the water and then a little further out just seeing the reflections!

Even though the surface is so calm overall, there is quite some current going on as you see from the eddies deforming it, both behind my swimming buddy and me. In pic 2 and the video you see the (stationary) sand ripples on the sea floor, and the shadows caused by surface deformations as the current moves around me and radiates waves upstream and creates eddies in the lee.

I am so lucky that I get to play with water and light and physics every day!

We went back for an afternoon swim. This morning I read up on #DiffractionSpikes because I got curious about them when I saw the first #jameswebbspacetelescope picture, so I can now confidently tell you that what you see here are “diffraction spikes due to dirty optics”. And as pretty as they are, this is my signal to go clean my camera…

Morning swim