hand-on activity (difficult) – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

BABY I’M BACK! What are these weird cells in the rotating tank?

mglessmer — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 19:08:58 +0000

My friend Torge (who I had a super exciting rotating tank experiment project with, “Dry Theory 2 Juicy Reality“, check it out!), sent me the picture above and asked whether I had any idea what was happening there. I had not. But I had to find out! (Sorry to everybody else who wanted something from […]

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Artikel “Praxisnähe dank digitaler Versuchsküche” von P. Mertsching über remote #KitchenOceanography

mglessmer — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 07:47:56 +0000

Im “eMagazin für aktuelle Themen der Hochschuldidaktik” der Uni Kiel ist der Artikel “Praxisnähe dank digitaler Versuchsküche” von Phil Mertsching über Torge’s und mein Projekt “Dry Theory 2 Juicy Reality”, insbesondere die Umsetzung im letzten Jahr mit den Zoom-Konferenzen aus meiner Küche, erschienen, zusammen mit vielen anderen spannenden virtuellen und hybriden Formaten. Es lohnt sich, da […]

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Collaborative Taylor column experiments during lockdown

mglessmer — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 15:40:19 +0000

We’ve become quite experienced with remotely-controlled rotating tank experiments, but the current lockdown brought us into yet another new-to-us situation: We had plans to film and live-stream tank experiments from Geomar, but not being employed there, I am currently not allowed in the building! So what happened this morning is that Torge and I met […]

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Taylor column in rheoscopic fluid

mglessmer — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 16:29:22 +0000

I have a slightly complicated history with Taylor column experiments — even though the experiments look fine compared to all other videos I’ve found online, I somehow always had higher expectations. But now I’ve tried doing the experiment in a rheoscopic fluid (approximately 2cm of it over the hockey puck) and it looks a whole lot […]

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Tilting frontal surface under rotation / cylinder collapse

mglessmer — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 15:55:52 +0000

Torge and I are planning to run the “tilting of a frontal surface under rotation / cylinder collapse” experiment as “remote kitchen oceanography” in his class on Thursday, so I’ve been practicing it today. It didn’t work out quite as well as it did when Pierre and I were running it in Bergen years ago, […]

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A common misconception in rotating tank experiments, and one way of maybe not reinforcing it

mglessmer — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 12:05:08 +0000

A very common misconception when looking at atmosphere & ocean dynamics in a rotating tank is that the center of the tank represents one of the poles and the edge of the tank the equator. And there is one experiment that — I fear — might reinforce that misconception, and that is the one we […]

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Solid body rotation

mglessmer — Sat, 30 May 2020 12:05:07 +0000

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 that I’m Playing with it Making videos of me playing with it Putting the videos on the internet Going to do video calls with my […]

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Rotating tank experiments on a cone

mglessmer — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 19:17:40 +0000

I had so much fun playing with rotating tank experiments on a cone this afternoon! And with Torge Martin (who I have the awesome #DryTheory2JuicyReality project with) and Rolf Käse (who got me into tank experiments with an amazing lab course back in 2004, that I still fondly remember). We tried so many different things, […]

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Taylor column

mglessmer — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 13:05:12 +0000

I was super keen on trying the Taylor column experiment, but maybe I expected things to look too much like my sketch below, or my technique isn’t quite perfect yet, but in any case, the results don’t look as good as I had hoped. This is the setup I was aiming for: put ice hockey […]

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Topographic Rossby wave

mglessmer — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 05:05:51 +0000

Next attempt at the topographic Rossby wave! This time with following the geosci.uchicago.edu instructions more closely… …and then the tank had hickups, so we did get waves, but a lot more diffusive than we had hoped, because the tank slowed down a lot more and in a more bumpy fashion than I had planned… Setup of […]

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