Mirjam Sophia Glessmer

Category: demonstration (easy)

Coffee in #KitchenOceanography

February 16, 2021
For some reason my workflow regarding all things #KitchenOceanography and #WaveWatching changed at the beginning of this year. I started editing frames on the pictures I’m posting on Instagram, and,…
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About #KitchenOceanography

February 15, 2021
At the end of last year, I did a poll on Twitter, asking what people would like to see more of in 2021: Kitchen oceanography, wave watching, teaching & scicomm…
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Thermal forcing vs rotation

May 23, 2020
The first experiment we ever ran with our DIYnamics rotating tank was using a cold beer bottle in the center of a rotating tank full or lukewarm water. This experiment is…
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Ekman layers in my kitchen

May 21, 2020
Several of my friends were planning on teaching with DIYnamics rotating tables right now. Unfortunately, that’s currently impossible. Fortunately, though, I have one at home and enjoy playing with it enough…
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Rossby-#WaveWatchingWednesday

May 20, 2020
Several of my friends were planning on teaching with DIYnamics rotating tables right now. Unfortunately, that’s currently impossible. Fortunately, though, I have one at home and enjoy playing with it enough…
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Playing for #FlumeFriday

January 17, 2020
Yesterday, we’ve had four rotating tables operating simultaneously, for three different experiments. The one that everybody is gathering around in the picture above is our favourite experiment: a slowly rotating…
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Experiment: Eddy in a jar

August 6, 2018
Rotating experiments in your kitchen. Eddies, those large, rotating structures in the ocean, are pretty hard to imagine. Of course, you can see them on many different scales, so you…
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Experiment: Interference of waves

July 27, 2018
Interference of waves is something often taught either using light as a practical example, or without a practical example. Here I want to show a couple of observations as well…
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Cloud in a bottle experiment

March 4, 2018
Guest post by Susann Tegtmeier (written two months ago, I just never got around to posting it. Sorry!) — No one likes clouds when they bring rain, but what if…
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Of cupcakes and ice cores

December 2, 2017
For a popular science presentation on climate change, I needed a simple illustration for how ice cores can be used as archives of past climates. Luckily, my sister and family…
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My workshop at MeerKlima.de

June 8, 2017
Today I ran a workshop at the MeerKlima.de congress in Hamburg: A congress for high school students, organised by a student committee. The large lecture theatre of the chemistry department at…
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Workshop prep and a riddle

June 7, 2017
Looking at the picture below, can you guess which experiment I am going to do at the MeerKlima.de workshop? Yep, my favourite experiment — melting ice cubes! :-) And I am…
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Pythagoras’ Cup

February 28, 2017
Yep, I’ve been playing this weekend :-) After seeing this on Facebook a while back I just couldn’t resist… Enjoy! :-)
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Evaporating sea water

January 3, 2017
How much salt is there in sea water? What concentration do you need before crystals start forming? What will those crystals look like? I am sure those are the kind…
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Spinningtop trajectories

January 14, 2016
A new physics toy in my house: A spinning top that has a pen as its tip and leaves trajectories as it spins! The trajectories are really cool. Depending on…
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Water seeks its level. U-tube experiment. By Mirjam S. Glessmer

When water doesn’t seek its level

January 12, 2016
Last week we talked about misconceptions related to hydrostatic pressure, and how water always seeks its level. Today I’m gonna show you circumstances in which this is actually not the…
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Water seeks its level. U-tube experiment. By Mirjam S. Glessmer

Water seeks its level

January 7, 2016
There are a lot of misconceptions related to hydrostatic pressure. One of them is that if you took a jug like the one below (or a U-tube, as in my…
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Interference of waves

September 4, 2015
The advantage of wind-less days on a sailing holiday is that you can play with water as much as you like. For example in order to look at the interference…
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On buoyancy

September 2, 2015
This is an experiment that Martin brought to Ratzeburg and that he let me use on my blog: Using a beam balance to talk about buoyancy. So at first we…
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Creating eddies

August 24, 2015
I always love watching paddles in water, or ships in water, or ducks in water, or anything water, really, but on a wind-less day in Ratzeburg, Siska managed to create…
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Stream lines and paper towels

July 15, 2015
We’ve been talking about stream lines a lot recently (see for example the flow around a paddle or flow around other stuff). I’ve always heard stories about a neat way of…
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Water bottle & bike pump rocket

June 19, 2015
This is another one of the experiments from the aerodynamics experiments kit that I borrowed at work (see here). We’ve all seen water bottle & bike pump rockets before, but…
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Ball balancing on air flow

June 15, 2015
Recently, someone at my university told me about a case of experiments connected to aerodynamics* that they occasionally use for demonstrations and outreach. Obviously, I asked if I might possibly…
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Vortex streets on a plate

February 23, 2015
You might think that three hours of canoe polo on a Saturday morning would be enough water for the day, but no.  As when I did the experiment for the “eddies in a…
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Signal velocity

February 18, 2015
How can a signal travel faster than the phase of a wave, or individual particles? I remember having a really hard time with the concept of a signal traveling faster…
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Eddies in a jar

January 28, 2015
Rotating experiments in your kitchen. Do you know those Saturday mornings when you wake up and just know that you have to do oceanography experiments? I had one of those…
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Playing with time lapse

January 26, 2015
One of my not-so-bright ideas as you’ll see… Last week we talked about the thought experiment on how all objects have to fall at the same rate. Which is clearly only…
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Heat engine – drinking bird

January 19, 2015
A heat engine. This is my sister’s drinking bird (which I was asked to mention explicitly). If you don’t know how they work, check out the image below or the…
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Steam boat

January 16, 2015
A pop pop boat in action! Following up on the steam-powered spinning top we talked about earlier, today we have a steam-powered pop pop boat. The mechanism is exactly the…
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Steam-powered spinning top

January 12, 2015
How changing the state of water can drive motion. Somehow over the holidays we ended up playing with a lot of toys related to the change of state of water,…
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Building a miniature well

November 28, 2014
Groundwater dynamics in the kitchen. This activity is suitable for young children who wonder where the tap water comes from. All you need is some sand, an empty toilet paper roll, and…
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Fog and clouds in a bottle

November 21, 2014
A little bit of hands-on meteorology for a change. This post is inspired by www.planet-science.com‘s “fog in a bottle” and “make a cloud in a bottle” posts. Inspired meaning that…
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Tides in a glass

October 31, 2014
A very simple experiment to show how waves can travel around an ocean basin. I wrote these instructions for a book project that I was lucky enough to get involved…
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Melting ice cubes, again

October 3, 2014
Somehow I am stuck on this demonstration! I can’t let go of this experiment. Last time I posted about it, someone (Hallo Papa!) complained about the background and how I…
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Conducting experiments at EMSEA14

October 1, 2014
Kristin’s and my workshop at EMSEA14. As I mentioned before, Kristin Richter and I are running the workshop “Conducting oceanographic experiments in a conventional classroom anywhere” at the European Marine Science…
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The icy elevator

September 29, 2014
Weird things happening when ice cubes melt. Remember I said that there were weird and wonderful things going on when I last ran the melting ice cubes in salt and…
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Melting ice cubes reloaded

September 26, 2014
Or why you should pay attention to the kind of salt you use for your experiments. The melting ice cubes in salt and fresh water is one of my favorites that…
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Learning with fluid toys

September 22, 2014
How fluid toys can be used to demonstrate principles of fluid mechanics. I guess every attempt to hide that I LOOOOVE fluid toys of any kind is futile. So imagine…
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Thermally driven circulation

August 28, 2014
One of my all-time favorite experiments. The salt group got a bit bored from watching ice cubes melt, so I suggested they look at temperature differences for a change, and…
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Wave interference in a tank

August 25, 2014
Creating waves and watching them interfere. (deutscher Text unten) You might not have guessed it from reading about our waves meeting over a sandbank experiment, but we weren’t doing in…
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Thermally-driven overturning circulation

August 23, 2014
Cooling on one end of the tank, heating on the other: A temperature-driven overturning. [deutscher Text unten] Always one of my favorite experiments – the overturning experiment (and more, and more).…
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Surface tension with a twist

August 11, 2014
The coolest surface tension demonstration yet! Just because it is AWESOME. Enjoy! Watch the video here. oh, you didn’t think I would only post one video, did you? ;-)
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Capillary effects

July 4, 2014
When hydrostatics just doesn’t explain things. Occasionally one notices water levels in straws that are slightly above the water levels in the glass. And of course – even though we…
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Marsigli’s experiment

June 4, 2014
Density-driven flow. The experiment presented in this post was first proposed by Marsigli in 1681. It illustrates how, despite the absence of a difference in the surface height of two fluids,…
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Vacuum pumps

April 20, 2014
What else did you think we tested them on? Before using my parents’ vacuum pumps (“vacuum” being used in a loose sense of the word…) on water in this post, we…
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Gases dissolved in water

April 14, 2014
A simple experiment to show that there are really gases dissolved in water. Luckily, my parents like to play at least as much as I do. So when I got…
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Lava

April 10, 2014
Don’t you just love lava lamps? I got a lot of weird looks when I excitedly told people about two years ago that I had just bought a lava lamp.…
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An overturning experiment (part 3)

March 7, 2014
By popular demand: A step-by-step description of the overturning experiment discussed here and here. I wrote this description a while ago and can’t be bothered to transfer it into the…
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An overturning experiment

March 3, 2014
A simple experiment that shows how the large-scale thermally-driven ocean circulation works. Someone recently asked me whether I had ideas for experiments for her course in ocean sciences for non-majors.…
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Barometer problem.

January 31, 2014
Still talking about hydrostatic pressure. Yes, I am not done with hydrostatic pressure yet! One of the problems students were given in the study “Identifying and addressing student difficulties with…
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Cartesian diver

January 20, 2014
Compressibility of water and air. Today I want to talk about the different compressibilities of water and air. Actually, no, I just want to show you an experiment. One way…
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Non-newtonian fluids.

January 17, 2014
Playing with cornstarch and water. The other day my mom and I played with cornstarch and water. I have always been wanting to experiment more with non-newtonian fluids, and then…
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Salt fingering – DIY

January 13, 2014
How to easily set up the stratification for the salt fingering process. Setting up stratifications in tanks is a pain. Of course there are sophisticated methods, but when you want…
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Salt fingering

January 8, 2014
How to show my favorite oceanographic process in class, and why. As I mentioned in this post, I have used double-diffusive mixing extensively in my teaching. For several reasons: Firstly,…
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Double-diffusive mixing

January 6, 2014
On the coolest process in oceanography. My favorite oceanographic process, as all of my students and many of my acquaintances know, is double-diffusive mixing. Look at how awesome it is:…
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Mediterranean outflow

December 2, 2013
Students demonstrating the mediterranean outflow in a tank. As reported earlier, students had to conduct experiments and present their results as part of CMM31. Niklas chose to demonstrate the mediterranean outflow…
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The broken spoon

November 6, 2013
Refraction of light in water. I just happened to notice this the other day, so I thought I’d take a picture and share it with you. It is amazing how…
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Water seeks its level.

November 4, 2013
A solution for the siphon problem of the fjord circulation experiment. After having run the fjord circulation experiments for several years in a row with several groups of students each…
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Why do we get an Ekman spiral?

October 11, 2013
Visualizing an Ekman spiral using a deck of cards. To state this right upfront: this post will not explain why the surface layer is moving at a 45 degree angle…
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Standing waves.

October 6, 2013
A seesaw to visualize how standing waves move in an enclosed basin. In enclosed basins, standing waves can occur. In the simplest case, they have a node in the middle…
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Progressive waves on a rope

October 5, 2013
Visualization of progressive waves: wave form and energy move forward while the rope itself stays in place. When I talked about waves in GEOF130 recently, in order to explain the…
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Tasting sea water reloaded

September 25, 2013
Doing the “tasting sea water” activity again with a different group of students. A very good introduction to the concept of salinity is the “tasting sea water” activity. Last time…
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Internal waves in a bottle

September 18, 2013
Internal waves are shown in simple 0.5l bottles. Waves travel on the interface between fluids of different densities and the phase speed of those waves depends on the density difference…
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How mountains form

September 17, 2013
A very simple visualization of rock folding. See? When I said “very simple” I meant “very simple”. But it does help explain why sometimes rock layers are not nice and…
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Forskningsdagene are almost upon us

August 30, 2013
Preparations for experiments to be shown at the science fair “forskningsdagene” are under preparation. Forskningsdagene, a cooperation between research institutes and schools, science centers and other educational places, will take…
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And even more on density

August 28, 2013
My favorite experiment. Quick and easy and very impressive way to illustrate the influence of temperature on water densities. Today in the “introduction to oceanography” (GEOF130) we conducted my favorite…
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More on density

August 28, 2013
Extremely simple experiment to illustrate the effect of density differences. At room temperature, will coke cans float or sink in freshwater? And how about coke light? Btw, this experiment is…
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Tasting sea water

August 28, 2013
Hands-on activity on sea water salinity In the first lecture of the “introduction to oceanography” GEOF130 course 2013, we investigated water samples from four different regions: The Mediterranean, the tropical…
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