On Thursday I went on a “let’s go for a walk, but if it starts raining too much, we’ll just go have coffee” trip with a friend to the east shore of Kiel fjord. And it’s always nice to get a different perspective! For example below: You see the large cranes from the shipyards that […]
A little more wave watching, today with a focus on how waves change direction when they run into shallow water. Let’s look at this beautiful wave and see what happens when it reaches the shallow shore. Above, you see the wake of the pilot ship, consisting of many wavelets that propagate as parallel wave crests towards […]
I have always really liked the artwork you see below that was installed in Store Lungegårdsvann when I still lived in Bergen. But on the pictures here you also see how awesomely waves are diffracted around it. Pretty and interesting oceanography? What’s not to love? :-)
Last night, we saw really nice wave phenomena on the Schlei in Schleswig. Do you see the waves being diffracted by the pier in the picture below? Waves are coming in from the right (see the three lines on the right in the picture below) and at the head of the pier they get bent around […]
Today I’m playing with the sun. As I mentioned in the sun dog post already, I recently went on the ferry from Kiel to Gothenburg. And I had plenty of time to watch the sun rise and set. One thing that kept me entertained for quite a while is to squeeze the sun through the imaginary […]
I really enjoyed reading the Gravett & Ajjavi (2022) article on “belonging as a situated practice”, especially since I see a connection with other thoughts I am having on place-based learning (inspired for example by Holmqvist & Millenberg (2024) and several of Servant-Mikols works) that I cannot quite put my finger on yet, so it was […]
I want to give you a quick summary of the super useful article “Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology” by Dunlosky et al. (2013). A lot of what I write about on here is about how we can improve our own teaching, but another really important aspect is […]
I know, it’s not even Wednesday today, but I have to get all the pictures out that have accumulated since the last #WaveWatchingWednesday post on January 19th! Because these days, I go swimming in the sea every day so pictures are accumulating over on Instagram fast! Since I’m sharing over four months in one post, […]
Chris Bore is one of the most loyal readers of my blog and has been for a long time, and now he wrote a beautiful post about #WaveWatching over on his own blog, and gave me permission to repost here. Thank you for loving #WaveWatching as much as I do, Chris! A few years back […]
The effort that went into today’s solar eclipse is nothing compared to the one in 2015, when we made it the topic of a workshop on how to use PBL in teaching (where the second session was happening exactly at the time of the solar eclipse, so we made it the topic of our case, which […]
It doesn’t feel like it, but today marks the 7-year-anniversary of my first blog post on my “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching”! To celebrate, I sent out this call to action (and please feel free to respond, no matter when you are reading this): Below, I am sharing the pictures that people sent me plus […]
Arnside is a beautiful little town on the banks of the river Kent, and Astrid and I went on a nice hike along the shores of the estuary a little while ago. The difference between high water and low water is quite impressive here, and we started our hike right after high tide to make […]
Did you miss my talk at the Science in Public conference in Manchester? Well, you are in luck — here it is! Three years ago, I visited my sister and her then four month old daughter. We spent an evening on the shores of the german river “Schlei”, close to their home. It was a beautiful […]
So today (and tomorrow and the day after) is the big event that I have been working towards all year in my not-so-new-anymore job: The GEO-Tag der Natur! If you are curious about what’s going on there, check out our Instagram account @geo.tag.der.natur that Kati is doing an amazing job with! As you can imagine, […]
I took the selfie above mainly to send to my mom from my vacation in Dornumersiel on the German North Sea coast. But then when looking through the hundreds of pictures I took that day, I realized that not only was my hair parted on the wrong side because it was so windy (ha!), the […]
Last night it rained a lot. So the first thing to do this morning was to check what that had done to my green lake! The dye is now a lot more diluted, but overall it still looks surprisingly green seeing that there is a lot of rain water draining into the lake. To give […]
And we are wave watching again! A ship’s wake and the different zones within Here is the wake of the little ferry that goes across Kiel canal. I love how you can see the different parts that a wake consists of: The V with the ship at its tip that consists of wavelets from the […]
So many people are surprised when I speak of wave watching as of a “real activity”. But to me it is! So I am going to talk you through a couple of minutes I spent looking out on the water where the Kiel Canal meets the Kiel fjord, right outside the locks at Kiel Holtenau. […]
Today I went on a wave-hunt expedition to take pictures for posts on the Froude and Reynolds number over at Elin & team’s blog (which you should totally check out if you haven’t done that yet! I am actually proof-reading my posts there and that is saying something ;-)) Anyway. Let’s look at the picture below. […]
As you see from my parents’ attire and the lack of leaves on the trees, these pictures are not brand new. But still interesting: Do you see how the waves are bent towards the coast as they run into shallower water? And can you believe I still have to look up which one is refraction […]
Wavelength dependency of wave-object-interactions. What a title! :-) But that is exactly what I observed over the enormous timespan of three full minutes (as shown by the time stamps of my camera) when I went strolling along Kiel Fjord one Saturday morning. First, I saw this old, overgrown tyre in a wave field that was […]
One of my favourite topics right now: Learning to “see” ocean physics wherever you go. For example here: A visit to my goddaughter in Schleswig, and this time we are practicing all she and her mom read about in MY BOOK (and if you have good ideas for a title for that book, please let me know!). […]
If you like my blog, you will LOVE my book. It’s an alternative travel guide: Instead of talking about sights you can see when you visit a city, I am talking about wave and current phenomena that you can spot on puddles, streams, lakes, or the ocean — anywhere, really. For that, I am showing tons of photos […]
As soon as waves run into water that becomes shallow enough for the wave to “feel” it, the waves start changing how fast they propagate. And depending on the shape of the topography, this often means that the waves change direction. This is called refraction and we can see it on many many different scales. On […]
A 1.5 hour walk around a lake — and 242 photos of said lake — later I can tell you one thing: You definitely don’t need to live close to the coast in order to observe wave phenomena! The idea to go on a “wave hunt expedition” is actually not mine (although it definitely sounds […]
