One day in the office at the Geophysical Institute in Bergen last Friday, and for the first time in a long time I am writing a little bit of oceanography and tank experiments again: My colleague Stefanie Semper and I published a SERC “Teach the Earth” activity on “ocean currents and overflows”! This activity is based on Steffi’s research that we describe in our article for kids on “How warm Gulf Stream water sustains a cold underwater waterfall” (Semper et al., 2022).

In the activity, we share materials to conduct a fun lesson on ocean currents and overflows: A slide show (with speaker notes!) that includes a quiz, a movie of Steffi talking about what it’s like to be a researcher, instructions for the overflow experiment, a movie of the overflow experiment in case the experiment goes wrong or the teacher does not want to go to all the trouble of doing it (even though they definitely should!), and ideas for a discussion of what one might modify in the experiment and what consequences that would then have.

Check it out and play! :-)

Semper S, Glessmer MS, Våge K and Pickart RS (2022) How Warm Gulf Stream Water Sustains a Cold Underwater Waterfall. Front. Young Minds. 10:765740. doi: 10.3389/frym.2022.765740