#WaveWatchingWednesday

Here is a whole summer worth of #WaveWatching pics from my Insta @fascinocean_kiel. With a bit of meta commentary around it, because there are SO many pictures. Enjoy!

First pic in this post is from when I went to Helsingborg to finally pick up my Swedish ID card, which then opens up all the possibilities of BankID. At this point, I had been in Sweden well over half a year and had not been able to open a proper bank account, sign up for the waiting lists for apartments, log into any of the tax/health/insurance websites… So I was excited to get the ID!

My favourite fountain in Helsingborg

Every time I’ve been in Helsingborg the waves have been great. Don’t know if I’ve just been lucky or if there are just ALWAYS great waves here… So here are a bunch of pictures.

Helsingborg is always great for #wavewatching, but as awesome as the waves undoubtedly are, the highlight of today was seeing Thea

Back home in Bjärred, I really enjoy taking the camera for a swim.

Morning swim

And a recurring theme on the more than one kilometer I am walking on the “long bridge” långa bryggan is the langmuir circulation whenever it is windy. Super nice to watch!

Nice #langmuircirculation stripes again this morning! I think I’m getting the hang of under what kind of wind conditions they start forming

But sometimes I also like water in different places, like the pond in the botanical garden in Lund.

#relationshipricheducation

But, back to my morning swims!

Today the morning swim involved some actual, necessary swimming & a wave over the head

Some do Dancing With The Stars, I do Swimming With The Rainbows. (On the very right edge of the picture, in case it doesn’t jump at you right away…)

I cannot remember what caused that cluster of drops in the foreground. It wasn’t raining, I wasn’t underneath a dripping gutter, I did get a wave in the face, but my head was only just above the water and those drops had more of an impact than if they had just come from my hair. Curious and curiouser. But they made pretty waves and I loved all the colors on this morning swim!

The next pictures are from a trip to Lomma, the next village along the coast towards Malmö. Pretty beach!

Love all the colors!

All the algae stuff in the water dampens out the short wavelength waves so the surface becomes less rough and only the longest wavelengths stay visible

So pretty

And back in Bjärred…

At some point I want to figure out how to do these half-over-half-underwater pics. Probably easiest if the camera is in a case and the area where the camera looks out of its case has a larger radius than the 1cm or so it currently has…

Then I went to Germany to pack all my stuff to then move it to Sweden. And of course to see my family…

And how many unicorns did you draw today?
For me, it started out with an underwater scene in one of my nieces’ “friend book”, where the seahorse became an “underwater unicorn”. And then a *real* underwater unicorn was requested (and an underwater racoon to camouflage something) and underwater fairies. And then overwater unicorns, fairies, castles in my other niece’s friend book, and then under- and overwater unicorns & fairies, castles, sand castles, picknick tables, … in bigger pictures.
I think counting all under- and overwater unicorns, in total I drew almost 20 today. And they were all colored in by my nieces, too!
But the more unicorns I drew, the more I included their wakes, boat and ducks’ wakes, fountains making waves… Gotta use every opportunity to talk about physics! ;)

And then I was back in Bjärred.

Home sweet home! I guess. Life is complicated ;) But who really cares when the wave watching is this awesome?

I know I keep repeating myself, but I LOVE these colors! And the transition between being able to look into the water & see the seafloor, and then just seeing the blue of the sky. Who would have thought that useless and boring physics stuff from school — like #TotalReflection — would have real-world applications?

Morning swim

Good morning! :)

That was only two nights in my new home, and then I was on my way to my other home away from home, Bergen! I really tried to book a train, but it was impossible (literally! not! possible!) to get a train within +/- 3 days of when I wanted to be there.

See the #oresundbridge in the top right? It spans something like 8km across öresund before reaching the artificial island pepparholm where road & railway run into a tunnel! Since there is a lot of ship traffic in öresund, the bridge had to be fairly high, but since CPH airport is super close, it could also not be high close to there. Hence the solution of bridge + artificial island + tunnel. It looks pretty spooky to see a road just lead to an island and disappear!

The only good excuse for clouds over water obstructing my #wavewatching: as a canvas for rainbows!

And then I arrived in Bergen to the most glorious weather.

Consistently great for #wavewatching: Lille Lungegårdsvannet. Due to the geometric shape with stark edges there are always beautiful reflections to be admired!

Next level of difficulty: beautiful reflections AND a swan making cool ring waves!

And my favourite fountain, especially when the pond is covered in leaves and it is bravely struggling to keep its little spot of open water!

And in Bergen, I went on a hike with two colleagues and a cute dog. Lots of pictures from this one, not even very long, hike!

Forget about wave watching, can you spot the goat in the tree?

Oh Bergen <3 <3 <3

Turns out the timing for my visit wasn’t very good — many of my friends were still on vacation! So I had to make new friends! :)

Since all my old swimming buddies conspired to all go on vacation exactly when I’m in town, I had a super civilized morning swim & sauna with three new swimming buddies, ha! I love swimming in the rain, it always makes wave watching extra special to see the little mushrooms and flying drops and cute little wave rings!

Nordnes Sjøbad is a really cool, historical bathing place with wooden houses and both a heated pool on land, and a roped-in area in the ocean.

This is what it looks like.

Good start of the day!

What do you mean “did you swim?”. No, I dipped into the fjord and then sat in the kids’ pool and looked at raindrops on the water!

Occasionally, I also did some work in Bergen…

Some super cool diffusive layering happening in this coffee, in a joint @seasprogrammeuib @iearth.no @sfubioceed exploration of how to bring disciplinary content into people’s everyday lives. I had so much fun, thanks for having me! P.S.: for more #KitchenOceanography with coffee, including my cool postcards, please check out my blog!

Thanks, ferry, for this beautiful wake on my walk to my morning swim!

Such a beautiful morning for a swim

What’s the equivalent to “glamping”, except with morning swims? Because that definitely is what this is!

What a lovely evening. Thank you, Sehoya & Jim!

Weekend at my happy place

Not a rainbow today, but at least a halo. I’ll take it…

Perfect lazy cabin morning when all the islands and Ulriken and Rundemannen and everything are gone, just wave watching all the way to where the rain takes over

I just found out that three of my @frontiersyoungminds articles have been translated to hebrew, and two to arabic. This is so exciting!

How did I not notice before today how perfect this spot is to observe diffraction of waves around an obstacle? See very clumsy annotation on the second pic: wave crests coming on from the right and then wrapping around the obstacle

Sauna with a great view and an even better @sfubioceed @iearth.no & visitors team meeting

Pretty much all of @sfubioceed simultaneously jumping into the water. Good thing I like waves and was already swimming anyway… But look at the awesome waves!

I love interesting reflections in waves!

And now my Bergen time is already over and, on my way back home, I’m visiting a friend in Voss!

A lot of air is being dragged down in the rapids and it looks so cool when it bubbles up in less turbulent areas downstream in all these tiny beads

Not just amazing waves where the water is shooting over obstacles and then slows down into the standing waves that continuously break, I also love the colors

Super cool standing & breaking wave right behind a big submerged obstacle, I have so many pictures and movies of it because it’s sooo coooool!

Super awesome currents and colors that I forgot to post yesterday

#bulkenbølgen
So much to see here! Not just how the higher surface roughness completely destroys the reflections of the mountains (that are partly disguised by clouds anyway), but more importantly how the water shoots down with this amazingly smooth surface before it is swallowed in the turbulence of a standing wave

#bulkenbølgen from below.
Thanks for shouting about 500 times over the noise of the water that I should really climb down, @kjersti.daae ;) My favourite water is the glassy, transparent parts of waves. Especially when they are splashing. Sooooo beautiful!

Cognitive dissonance for this flat land creature when looking at this picture: how can there be so much splashing water when the waves are so smooth so there clearly isn’t a lot of wind locally, and you also are so far inland that you see this kind of coastline, so the body of water isn’t large enough for such large waves to form elsewhere and just travel here? And all that because I’m not used to elevation influencing my currents in any mayor way

Downstream of this small waterfall a lot of foam is collecting in this little bay, acting as a great tracer to show both the recirculation within the bay and the shear instabilities and eddies detaching at the edge. I could watch this forever, but I made a timelapse for you (ok, five, and a hundred videos…)

Thanks to @iearth.no and especially @theakross and @mattias.lundmark I have this weird, new-found appreciation of rocks. Especially when I see how water was involved in shaping them, as with these awesome potholes :)

Oh you meant morning swim? I thought you said mountain swim!
Thanks for the swim and pictures @kjersti.daae :)

Swimming with a camera is the most fun!

Coming out of the water after a swim always feels like being reborn. Kinda like how that little buddy must feel, except that I didn’t crawl out of my skin like they did…

Even in the mountains I’m still fascinated by puddles

In the sad absence of waves, reflections and clouds (and reflections of clouds) can also be incredibly beautiful!

And now I’m on the train to Oslo.

Glacier watching from the train! And wave watching: see the sheltered areas in the lee of the shoreline with the super smooth surfaces, and the higher surface roughness where the wind actually reaches the water?

Taking the train home means a two-day journey, but with views like this it’s definitely not a hardship!

Thanks to the long train ride (and @kjersti.daae’s recommendation), I just read Tor Arve Røssland’s book “Overleve. Vulkanen vaknar”. It’s a book written for teenagers and tells the story of two kids (who couldn’t be more different from each other and who are both intriguing characters), who end up on a research ship in a future where melting glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica have led to rising sea levels: in Reykjavik, buoys mark the spots where houses are just below the sea surface and ships can’t sail, Bergen has become the Bergen basin with dams protecting it from the sea. There is famine in the world despite the chinese drone bees that can pollienate crops. There are hardly any fish left in the ocean. This has obviously led to conflicts, in one of which the ship & everybody on it get unwillingly involved. I got completely sucked into the story (what’s not to love: a kid with blue hair on a research ship?) and now have to get my hands on part 2, and hope that part 3 will come out soon!

Arrived in Oslo! At 30 degrees!

Oh #shelies has moved closer to the opera! I am really not that into sculptures usually, but this one I really like

When I had a good Internet connection again, I posted a blogpost I had written on the train.

Sofia (almost 6) asks “how many waves hit the beach every day?”. Check out my blog for my attempt at an answer (link in bio). What would you have said?
(Yep, not only did I read a cool climate fiction book in nynorsk on the train yesterday, I also tried to come up with a good response. And both of it was so much fun! I like travelling by train :)

And then I got on the next train!

#slowtravel #fromthetrainwindow

What is it with these jellyfish clouds? @hcsteenlarsen @aesthetics.of.weather @tommotiges ? Never seen them before. And they are real — the only disturbance by the train window is the reflection of the lights going across the picture…

And then I was back in Bjärred.

What a great morning for a swim!

I really didn’t want to get out of the water again today

After work swim. Or, as @cathybovill says, living my best life!

After work swims turn out to be a pretty good idea in these temperatures!

I’m getting better at the split photography thing. Helps if there is floaty bio stuff in the water. Good thing I didn’t see that until after!

Look! #öresundsbron in the background! Just in case you were distracted by all the pretty waves

Best start of the day! #morningswim

Oh how I missed you, foam stripes…

Today there were so many people swimming that I didn’t feel comfortable taking pictures of waves the usual way (you know, camera in the air, looking at the air-sea interface from above) for fear of making them uncomfortable. So I took pics from inside the water, facing up! And I quite like it: first pic some ring waves where a drop fell in the water, second pic crisscrossing of capillary waves. And pretty colors, too! Might try this more in the future

Here is proof: sometimes I DO turn my back to the water! For example for happy blackberries, like these, who spent the whole summer looking at the sea. Also how else would I take a selfie that has the sea in it? Duh!

I would love to share the amazing impressions I got today on my first “deep” freedive in a quarry: the light rays and shadows of other divers in the turquois, milky water, and just above the surface the bright colors of the buoys and houses and sky, and the feeling of accomplishment of diving down through the thermocline into the cold water and then up again, but I was so excited that I forgot my camera in the car! So instead I’m sharing Mats’ picture of one of the buoys and some weights pre-dive, and hope I’ll remember my camera next time. Thank you so much Kina and Mats and family, and everybody at Active Divers really, for making me feel so safe and cared for! This was an amazing experience and I can’t wait to do it again!

As surreal as it looks, but this is really today’s after work swim!

I love kitschy sunsets! Especially because they make it so easy to see the different features on the water: waves running in different directions, higher surface roughness where there is a breeze, … Lovely!

I fell right back into work after getting back from Norway (in fact, I went into the office before I even brought my stuff home from the train station!), and it has been busy!!! But yesterday I co-led an all-day workshop in Malmö that ended with a cool boat trip in amazing weather.

Hard day at work, including a guided boat tour in Malmö

And today I am working from home. It’s not that I don’t also enjoy lunch breaks at the office, but they do not compare with home office lunch breaks, see below…

I really like this split picture where we have this wide band of looking into the water through the surface, and then below a bit where we are looking directly into the water. So cool to see how pattern are clearly deformed in different ways when you look through the air-sea-interface! And then of course the lovely blue sea with the #turningtorso in the background…

And that’s it for today! Time to take some more pictures of water! :)

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