Category Archives: demonstration (difficult)

Tilting of a frontal surface under rotation

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Eddy in a rotating tank.

This is an experiment that Pierre and I ran two years ago in Bergen but that – as I just realized – has not been featured on this blog before. Which is a pity, because it is a pretty cool experiment.

Under rotation, vertical fronts with different densities on either side can persist for a long time without leading to the density-driven adjustment shown in the non-rotating Marsigli experiment. This is what we demonstrate with this experiment.

In a not-yet-rotating tank, dyed salt water is filled into a centered cylinder while, at the same time, fresh water is filled in the tank outside of the cylinder.

This setup is then spun up for approximately half an hour. Then, the cylinder can be carefully removed and the column of dense water can adjust to the new conditions.

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The rotating tank just as the cylinder is being removed

When the cylinder is being removed, disturbances are being introduced. Hence, several columns with sloping fronts develop in the rotating system.

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Dense columns developing towards an equilibrium state in the rotating system.

This is what the rotating tank looks like from the side several minutes after the cylinder has been removed.

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Side view of the sloping front around the dense column

Here are a couple of movies of this experiment. First a top view (note how you can see the deformation of the surface when you focus on the reflection of the ceiling lights on the water’s surface!):

Then a side view:

And finally (just because it’s fun) this is what it looks like when you switch off the rotation of the tank when you are done with the experiment:

Hydraulic jump II

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More movies of my kitchen sink.

I am really fascinated by the hydraulic jumps in my kitchen sink. I can’t believe I haven’t used this before when I was teaching! Yes, movies of rivers and rapids are always really impressive, too, but how cool is it to be able to observe hydraulic jumps in your own sink? Let me remind you:

Hydraulic jump in my kitchen sink. Video here

So this is what happens when the water jet hits the (more or less) level bottom of the sink. But what would happen if it instead hit a slope?

Now, if I wasn’t working a full-time job, or if that job wasn’t completely unrelated to anything to do with hydraulic jumps, I would now proudly present movies of all kinds of hydraulic jumps on sloped surfaces. As it is, I can tell you that I have tons of ideas of where to go to make really nice movies, but for now this is all I can offer:

Yes, that is a chopping board in a sink. It shows really nicely how the hydraulic jump occurs closer to the point of impact of the jet as you go uphill (because the water slows down faster going in that direction than going downhill) and again how the radius depends on the flow speed of the jet. Stay tuned for a more elaborate post on this!

Hydraulic jumps

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Water changing its velocity from above to below the critical velocity.

Recently in beautiful Wetzlar: The river Lahn flows through the city below the medieval cathedral at sunset. And I’m showing you this because we can observe a hydraulic jump!

A hydraulic jump occurs when water that was flowing faster than the critical speed suddenly slows down to below the critical speed. Some of its kinetic energy is converted to potential energy (see the higher surface levels of the turbulent part of the fluid {except in this example the water is flowing down a steep slope, so the higher levels are a bit tricky to observe}) and a lot of energy is lost to turbulence. A very nice example can be seen here:

As the water moves away from where the jet hits the sink, it slows down. Can you spot the hydraulic jump? Isn’t it cool to watch how it is pushed away if the flow rate is higher, and how it comes back again when the tap is slowly closed?

P.S.: Yes, I’m being very vague about what that critical speed might be. Stay tuned for a post on that, I’m working on it! Just had to share the Lahn movie :-)

Hydrostatic pressure

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What are students not understanding about hydrostatic pressure?

Tomorrow (today by the time this post will go online, I guess) I will present the paper “Identifying and addressing student difficulties with hydrostatic pressure” by Loverude, Heron and Kautz at the Journal Club at work. So tonight I am trying out a couple of experiments that I would like to show with it.

I already know that I am not supposed to show the experiments during the talk, but I figure that there is no harm in having them prepared in case anyone wants to see them afterwards.

And good thing I tried them before instead of just assuming that they would work!

For the first experiment, I had this awesome idea to re-create something I saw as a child when on vacation on a farm:

I was clearly very impressed with it – this picture is from 1994 and I remembered it and asked my parents to track it down for me!

Anyway. Since I wasn’t sure if my colleagues would be happy with that amount of water on the floor, I decided to go for a smaller version of the same thing.

This is what I wanted it to look like (and what it looks like in my presentation):

hydrostaticpressure01

Hydro(almost)static pressure in the idealized case.

And this is what the experiment ended up looking like:

How disappointing! I guess the holes that I poked into the bottle aren’t well made. But good thing I tried. Watch the movie if you want to pay attention to if you ever want to present this experiment.

Yes. You want to use tape that keeps the water inside the bottle. Until you want to take the tape off. Then you wish you had used something that actually comes off…… ;-)

Student cruises (part 4 of many – weird profiles)

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When a CTD profile suddenly looks really weird.

As mentioned before, student cruises seem to bring out the weird experiences with CTDs. My theory is that it’s the world testing us. It would be bad enough to deal with this stuff if we were on CTD watch in the middle of the night on our own, but dealing with it in front of a group of eager students, all asking questions when you just want to think, is the ultimate test of whether you know your stuff and have the nerves to deal with anything.

So, of course, this year’s GEOF130 student cruise couldn’t be an exception. After dealing with an unfortunate encounter of the CTD and the bottom about which we shall not say any more than this, the next profile looked like this:

Not seeing it yet? Let me zoom in for you:

A really weird offset between downcast and upcast occurred in density and salinity, persisted for about 100m, ended with a huge spike and then disappeared.

So what happened? I have actually no idea. I’ve seen jellyfish being sucked into the pump, resulting in fresh spikes. And that salinity and density react very similarly even for anomalies is not that surprising, seeing that one is calculated from the other. But why would the shape of the profile stay the same, only shifted towards fresher values and lower densities? Ideas, anyone?

Student cruise (part 3 of many, or – when the CTD didn’t start up)

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When a CTD just doesn’t start pumping.

In this post, I talked about how student cruises always happen to be on the perfect days, and then in this post I talked about how to read CTD profiles. So now knowing all of this, here is a confession: I have never seen so much weird stuff happen to the CTD as on student cruises!

Last year, I took my students of the GEOF130 course out. We had two groups on a one-day cruise each, on FS G. O. Sars, the new-ish and fancy Bergen-based research ship.

Of course, as any real cruise, we started with a safety briefing with the officers.

But listening to the rules wasn’t enough, students had to also try on the survival suits.

But then at some point, we started doing science.

Since I already talked about what the CTD operator typically sees on the screen, I’m only showing you the ones you haven’t seen yet. Did I mention that the G.O. Sars is a pretty fancy ship? And this doesn’t even show the met data or fish finder, which were on yet another cluster of screens.

Finally, we were on station and ready to deploy the CTD.

But then, when the CTD was finally in the water, we waited. And waited. And waited. And nothing happened! We waited some more, but the pump on the CTD just didn’t switch on. We lowered the CTD. And lowered it some more. And waited. And then, when we were almost ready to bring it back up on deck, we brought it even deeper and it started up! When we got the first readings, we realized what had been the problem. The CTD pumps are set to switch off when salinities fall below a certain value. This is done to make sure the pump switches off when the CTD isn’t in the water any more to avoid having the pump run dry. And since we were in a fjord (where we typically have a fresh layer on top, see this experiment) on a calm day after a very calm week, clearly, the salt stratification had become so strong that we couldn’t even measure the top layer because our CTD didn’t recognize it was in the sea! I’ve never seen this happen before.

But then finally we brought the CTD back up on deck and students could start to practice sampling.

We were incredibly lucky with the weather, and since we had Sindre Skrede visit us, we can even document it with beautiful pictures!

The end! :-)

Student cruise (part 2 of many, or – reading CTD profiles)

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Reading CTD profiles.

In this post, I talked about student cruises and why they are important for motivation. Here I want to go into a bit more detail on one of the actual learning outcomes: Using the CTD to make measurements, and reading the profiles.

I already talked about how a CTD works a while back, but today I want to go into a bit more detail of what you can actually see in a CTD profile when you are sitting in the lab at sea, staring at the monitor, while the CTD is going up or down.

There are a couple of important things to note here. First, let’s go through the command windows on the right. The lowest one is general cruise information that goes into the header of the data file: Station number, cruise name, chief scientist, this kind of things.

The next window up is the position and time of that station. Important information for the header of the data file, not so crucial for the CTD operator to know.

But then the next window up is where it gets interesting. The yellow field shows the distance from the instrument to the sea floor, calculated from an echosounder-like instrument mounted on the CTD. The distance from the bottom is really important to know, since you will want to make sure that the CTD does not ever hit the bottom, and the depths in sea charts are not very reliable if you are in remote areas.

And then lastly, the most interesting window on the left. This is where data is displayed in real time as it is measured while the CTD is being lowered and hoisted up again. On the horizontal axis, the properties (temperature, salinity, density and oxygen) are displayed against depth on the vertical axis. You see water being warmer and fresher towards the surface than at depth, with higher oxygen concentrations near the surface. So far, so good.

In the blow-up in the figure above you see several interesting features. But I want to focus on one in particular: The blue oxygen curve.

In the depth range displayed here, the downcast (measured when the CTD went down) and the upcast (measured when the CTD went up again) don’t agree very well. And while one of them is nice and smooth, the other one shows many wiggles. Why is that?

When sitting in front of the monitor on CTD watch, it is easy to forget that the vertical axis displays pressure. As you watch the graph build up, it seems like it might as well be time. The longer you watch, the further down the CTD sinks, until at some point it turns around and comes back up. When you’ve done a couple of CTD stations, you know very well how long any given station will take and you have optimized what point you need to get ready to step outside and help bringing the CTD back in in order to be there on time but not any earlier than necessary.

However, what is displayed on the vertical axis is depth. Or, if you want to be even more precise, pressure. Usually, pressure can be converted to depth fairly easily. For every 10 meter you go down in water, the pressure increases by 1 bar. This is, however, assuming that the water surface stays in the same place. In the station shown above, this was clearly not the case. All the wiggles you see in the profile? Yeah, waves. And if you look closely at the plot, you can estimate their amplitude. Yes, about 5 meters.

So this is why you want to always keep an eye on that number in the yellow field – the distance from the bottom. In case of this station we were lucky: We had a wave train coming through as the CTD was about half way down, but while we were close to the bottom the sea was relatively calm. But that was dumb luck. We have also been on station when the waves were highest while we were closest to the bottom. And that is when CTD operators get very nervous, especially on cruises where one of the main objectives is to measure as close to the bottom as possible. But as always: better safe than sorry; better lose some data close to the bottom than the whole CTD.

Student cruising

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Why student cruises always end up being on the most beautiful days of the year, or: why student cruises are an important part of the education.

Remember the picture I showed in the last post, that was worthy of being on an Advent calendar or postcard? The one below?

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FS Håkon Mosby arriving back in Bergen in November 2013.

That was taken on this year’s GEOF130 student cruise.

And remember the ice-on-Hardangerfjorden picture I shared a while back? This one?

Oh, taken on this year’s GEOF332 student cruise.

And the student cruise before, GEOF130 in 2012, looked like this:

See a pattern here?

So how come we always end up being out on the perfect day? Well, firstly, clearly I am that good. Or that lucky. But then, the perfect day only becomes the perfect day when you give it the chance.

What I mean is that on student cruises, it is easy for a day to become perfect. Because it is exciting to be on a research ship for the first time, to figure out how to measure oceanographic data, to develop a feeling for how much the ship is actually supposed to be rolling before you have any reason to become concerned, to see how your oceanography classes apply to the real world, to put on an orange one-fits-all survival suit, to gauge how you can influence the quality of the data by paying attention (or not), to get a break from your everyday life, to eat all the awesome food all the time, to visit the captain on the bridge, to see the familiar city from the water, to see a whole new world opening up to you, to experience what it could be like to be an oceanographer.

Especially in the “introduction to oceanography” lecture GEOF130, the student cruise is so much more than just knowledge transfer – it is an incredibly important part of building a professional identity that helps students to find motivation to sit through boring lectures and to fight through difficult exams because in the end they will then get to do this again: to go an another cruise and have more perfect days at sea.

 

Rogue waves in a bath tub

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Trying to create rogue waves in the bath tub of the infamous “red house”.

As a part of their projects, students in the CMM31 in Isafjördur course had to conduct an experiment, document and interpret it. One of the students, Silvia, chose to create rogue waves in the bath tub of the “red house”, one of the student houses, and I was invited to participate and eat delicious cupcakes.

Since rogue waves can have devastating effects on ships they encounter, clearly we had to have a ship. None were to be found, so we had to make our own.

Since most studies of rogue waves in wave tanks had a hard time actually producing the waves (and a bathtub might not be the most ideal setup) we did not have high hopes that our experiment would be successful. And we did not manage to produce rogue waves in the strict sense – but we managed to avoid major spillage of the tub and still sink a couple of the paper boats, so at least we were getting some results.

Great to see students do experiments on a Sunday afternoon!

Water not in solid body rotation yet

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Confusing students even more by discussing how momentum is being transferred from the tank to the water.

As you remember, we are preparing for the Ekman experiment and need to spin up the tank to solid body rotation.

We had started discussing how, when observed from the co-rotating camera, particles seem to be slowing down relative to the coordinate system underneath the tank as we are approaching solid body rotation.

And this is where I usually confuse the students even more, because I start talking about how momentum is being transferred from the tank to the water. For that, I point out how when observing the tank from the non-rotating framework, the particles further away from the center are moving faster than the ones closer towards the center…

(and on the screen: particles closer to the center are moving faster than the ones further away).

Why is that?

Well, for exactly the same reason we can use this setup to simulate Ekman spirals: Because when the tank is sped up or slowed down, this initially creates friction with the water inside. And as the layer that is in direct contact with the tank is brought to the same speed as the tank, it changes its velocity relative to the next layer, which creates friction and influences the movement of this second layer. And so on and so forth.

I think that it is really useful to point this out, and in some of the groups students jump at it and understand where I am going right away, but in other groups I just cannot phrase it in a way that they understand me. Or maybe they are just not as fascinated as I am by being able to see how friction inside water propagates momentum and hence don’t get excited? Who knows.

[Thanks, Pierre, for your help with the filming!]