New SERC “Teach the Earth” Activity on “Ocean Currents and Overflows”
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…
Category: hands-on activity (easy)
24 days of #KitchenOceanography — now available as a book!
For all of you who know and love my “24 days of #KitchenOceanography” series (and for those who need to quickly look up what that was about and then fall…
A simple way to visualize how hydrostatic pressure increases with depth
I did this demo for my freediving club Active Divers (and if you aren’t following us on Insta yet, that’s what I am taking all these pretty pictures for!): 1.5l PET…
Denmark Strait overflow in a tank experiment
Since our Denmark Strait tank experiment from 2013 (see here in a post from 2014!) is still the one I refer to when I want to point to pictures of…
A #KitchenOceanography escape game for freedivers!
For the Christmas party of my freediving club, Active Divers, I made a freediving-themed #KitchenOceanography “escape game” (of sorts). If you are interested to use it for your own purposes,…
Using coffee in a talk on kitchen oceanography
I have been a bit quiet on here recently, because I had so many exciting projects going on that I did not manage to document them in real time (well,…
Our presentation at #FieldWorkFix: “An interactive mobile adventure on coastal protection”
This summer I had a fun little side project: I was co-supervising a Bachelor thesis in geography at Kiel University! Janina Dreeßen, with Katja Kuhwald as her main supervisor, did…
Molecular diffusion at different temperatures (involving tea bags and some convection)
I thought I had posted the picture below some time in winter already, but when I recently searched for it, I couldn’t find it. So either I didn’t post it,…
Can your favouite beverage tell you what your reseach as an ocean scientist should be on?
A “fortune teller” for #WorldOceanDay! What would you work on if you were an ocean scientist? And if you are an ocean scientist — are you doing the work you…
Coffee in #KitchenOceanography
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,…
About #KitchenOceanography
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…
Published in Oceanography: How to Teach Motivating and Hands-On Laboratory and Field Courses in a Virtual Setting
One of the few “behind the scenes” shots of me taking #WaveWatching pictures! See the super awesome current right at my feet? :-D⠀ ⠀ Similar to kitchen oceanography, I believe…
My iEarth “Christmas Lecture” on #KitchenOceanography
I gave a talk withing iEarth’s seminar series to introduce myself to the network last week. And since it was the last lecture before the Christmas break, I tried to turn it…
Rotating vs non-rotating turbulence
Last Thursday, Torge & I invited his “atmosphere & ocean dynamics class” to a virtual excursion into my kitchen — to do some cool experiments. As you know, I have…
A #WaveWatching memory game for #SciCommChall
So I don’t know if this is a good idea that anyone would actually want to play with. But when I was visiting my sister last week, she was working…
Thermal forcing vs rotation tank experiments in more detail than you ever wanted to know
This is the long version of the two full “low latitude, laminar, tropical Hadley circulation” and “baroclinic instability, eddying, extra-tropical circulation” experiments. A much shorter version (that also includes the…
Thermal forcing vs rotation
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…
Ekman layers in my kitchen
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…
Rossby-#WaveWatchingWednesday
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…
Brine rejection and overturning, but not the way you think! Guest post by Robert Dellinger
It’s #KitchenOceanography season! For example in Prof. Tessa M Hill‘s class at UC Davis. Last week, her student Robert Dellinger posted a video of an overturning circulation on Twitter that got me…
On melting ice cubes and molecular diffusion of heat
First of all, let me say how much I love having chats like the one Elin and I had over the weekend (which you only see the very beginning of…
Temperature dependency of molecular diffusion, and convection taking over
I saw the idea for this experiment on Instagram (Max is presenting it for @glaeserneslabor) and had to try it, too! The idea is to put drops of dye into…
Reposting my “field report” for the DIYnamics blog
Reposting a guest post I wrote for the @DIYnamicsTeam‘s blog: When we came across the DIYnamics article right after its publication, Torge and I (Mirjam) were very excited about the…
A recent seminar presentation on “one should really play more!” and our rotating tanks
Using “One should really play more!” as title of a presentation in a serious scientific colloquium might seem like a bold move, but the gamble payed off: a large, interested…
Playing for #FlumeFriday
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…
Thermal forcing in a non-rotating vs rotating case: Totally different results
On Thursday, I wrote about the thermally driven overturning circulation experiment that Torge and I did as past of our “dry theory 2 juicy reality” experiments, and mentioned that it…
Salt fingers in my overturning experiment
You might have noticed them in yesterday’s thermally driven overturning video: salt fingers! In the image below you see them developing in the far left: Little red dye plumes moving…
Thermally driven overturning circulation
Today was the second day of tank experiments in Torge’s and my “dry theory 2 juicy reality” teaching innovation project. While that project is mainly about bringing rotating tanks into…
If one rotating table is awesome, four rotating tables are…?
I’m actually at a loss for words. Amazing? Spectacular? So much fun? All of that! Today was the first time Torge and I tried our four DIYnamics-inspired rotating tables in…
Phase and group velocities in deep and shallow water
When Tor came to visit me in GFI’s basement lab a couple of days ago, he told me about an experiment he had seen in Gothenburg in the seventies. So…
Ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water
Today we are doing the melting ice cubes experiment in fancy glasses, because Elin is giving a fancy lecture tonight: The Nansen Memorial Lecture of the Norwegian Science Academy in…
Planetary Rossby waves on Beta-plane. A super easy tank experiment!
This is seriously one of the easiest tank experiments I have ever run! And I have been completely overthinking it for the last couple of weeks. Quick reminder: This is…
Guest post by Dan Wallace: A machine learning system playing a game to super-human levels, using only plastic boxes and beads
Hi, I’m Dan Wallace, a PhD student at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research in Southampton, UK. I’m interested in lots of areas of acoustics — here I am…
Tidal mixing on a (fjord’s) sill
A pink swirl going across a styrofoam block underneath a layer of yellow water? What’s going on here? The picture was taken in a water tank, simulating the circulation of…
Melting ice cubes experiment published in kids’ journal Frontiers Young Minds
On publishing in a journal peer-reviewed by kids, and suggesting it as a first journal new PhD students should be asked to write for You guys might remember my favourite…
My kids’ article on the formation of sea ice is out!
I recently published an article about how sea ice forms which, I think, turned out pretty well. But the coolest thing is the illustration that Jessie Miller did to go along with…
Ostfriesentee — Double diffusion in a tea cup
Showing double-diffusive mixing in tank experiments is a pain if you try to do it the proper way with carefully measured temperatures and salinities. It is, however, super simple, if…
#kitchenoceanography or #bathtubphysics? Playing with cool phenomena, water and dye
Some bathtub magic today! Let’s take a paper kitchen towel and an empty glass. Squish the paper towel into the empty glass, submerge it upside down into the water aaand……
Guest post: Alice shows magic tricks and explains refraction of light in water
My friend Alice Langhans runs a super cool science communication Instagram (@edu_al_ice), where she posts about her experiences as PhD student in physics education research. And there is a lot more…
Bottom Ekman layer without a rotating table
Can you do a bottom Ekman layer demonstration without a rotating table? That’s the kind of challenge I like :-) The way I’ve previously showed bottom Ekman layers is by…
Update on freezing ice cubes and the temperature distribution in our freezer
After writing the blog post on sea ice formation, brine release and what ice cubes can tell you about your freezer earlier today, I prepared some more ice cubes (because you…
Sea ice formation, brine release, or: What ice cubes can tell you about your freezer
Many of my kitchen oceanography experiments use dyed ice cubes, usually because it makes it easier to track the melt water (for example when looking at how quickly ice cubes…
Thinking about the Doppler effect as of a boat sailing against the waves!
I can’t believe I haven’t written about this on my blog before, thanks Markus Pössel for reminding me of this great way to understand the Doppler effect! Doppler effect, or…
A #scicommbookforkids for #scicommchall
I hope by now you have heard about my pet project of the moment: #scicommchall! For #scicommchall, I give myself (and quite a few other people by now) monthly challenges…
Layered latte: A great real-life example of double-diffusive mixing!
Sometimes sitting in a café for a work meeting with #lieblingskollegin Julia can lead to unexpected discoveries of oceanographic processes — in my latte! It’s those little things that inspire blog…
Experiment: Double-diffusive mixing (salt fingering)
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:…
Guest post: Using seawater to make bread!
Last week I got one of the coolest emails I have ever received: Someone had found my blog while googling for the salt content of seawater in order to use…
Experiment: Temperature-driven circulation
My favorite experiment. Quick and easy and very impressive way to illustrate the influence of temperature on water densities. This experiment is great if you want to talk about temperature…
Tides themselves don’t induce (a lot of) mixing, only tides hitting topography do. An experiment.
As you might have noticed, the last couple of days I have been super excited to play with the large tanks at GFI in Bergen. But then there are also…
Experiment: Oceanic overturning circulation (the slightly more complicated version)
The experiment presented on this page is called the “slightly more complicated version” because it builds on the experiment “oceanic overturning circulation (the easiest version)” here. Background One of the…
Experiment: Oceanic overturning circulation (the easiest version)
“The easiest” in the title of this page is to show the contrast to a “slightly more complicated” version here. Background One of the first concepts people hear about in the context…
Four steps to great hands-on outreach experiences
Part 1 and 2 of this post were first posted on the EGU’s blog on Jan 29, 2016, and Feb 29, 2016, respectively. Part 1 gives four steps to outreach…
Experiment: Eddy in a jar
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…
Experiment: Demystifying the Coriolis force
Mirjam S. Glessmer & Pierré D. de Wet Abstract Even though experiments – whether demonstrated to, or personally performed by students – have been part of training in STEM for…
Experiment: Interference of waves
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…
Experiment: Ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water
Explore how melting of ice cubes floating in water is influenced by the salinity of the water. Important oceanographic concepts like density and density driven currents are visualized and can…
Asking students to take pictures to help them connect theory to the reality of their everyday lives
— This post was written for “Teaching in the Academy” in Israel, where it was published in Hebrew! Link here. — Many times students fail to see the real-life relevance of…
Cloud in a bottle experiment
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…
The energy lab’s dry run. Or: I have a great team! :-)
At first, I wanted to call this blog post “behind the scenes of a school lab” until I looked through the pictures and realized that all I am showing is…
My new school lab on energy in the climate system has been launched! :-)
Today was a very exciting day: We launched my new school lab on energy in the climate system! The “energie:labor” is finally up and running again! Let me walk you…
Of cupcakes and ice cores
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…
Observing the “melting ice cubes” experiment with a thermal imaging camera
Remember the melting ice cube experiment? Great! If I had the chance to teach an intro to oceanography or some other class where I have time with students over a…
Melting ice cubes experiment — observing the finer details
If you don’t know my favourite experiment for practically all purposes yet (Introduction to experimenting? Check! Thermohaline circulation? Check! Lab safety? Check! Scientific process? Check! And the list goes on…
Melting ice cubes & thermal imaging camera
I haven’t talked about my favourite experiment in a long time (before using it last week in the MeerKlima congress and suddenly talking about it all the time again), because I…
My workshop at MeerKlima.de
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…
Workshop prep and a riddle
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…
Air-sea gas exchange inhibited by oil layer on water? Yes, but not always
I have been brainstorming hands-on experiment ideas for a project dealing with the influence of oil films on air-sea gas exchanges, and one idea that I really liked was this…
Using real time data of ship positions in teaching?
This morning I was looking for the current position of a research vessel on MarineTraffic.com and noticed something that should maybe not have been surprising, but that I had never really…
Pythagoras’ Cup
Yep, I’ve been playing this weekend :-) After seeing this on Facebook a while back I just couldn’t resist… Enjoy! :-)
Fictitious forces (2/5): Experiencing frames of reference on a playground
How can you be moving in one frame of reference, yet not moving in another? We talked about the difficulty of different frames of reference recently, so today I want…
Fictitious forces (1/5): Record players and Coriolis deflection
An experiment showing how seemingly straight trajectories can be transformed into curly ones. One of the phenomena that are really not intuitive to understand are fictitious forces. Especially relevant in…
Evaporating sea water
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…
Frost flowers on ice cream: When you start thinking about phenomena and something really annoying, all of a sudden, becomes really cool.
Frost flowers on ice cream. You must have seen them before: They sometimes occur when you’ve had some ice cream, put the left-overs back in the freezer, and take them out…
Taking the hydrostatic paradox to the next (water) level
How well do people understand hydrostatics? I am preparing a workshop for tomorrow night and I am getting very bored by the questions that I have been using to introduce…
Using the “melting ice cube” experiment to let future instructors experience inquiry-based learning.
Using the “melting ice cube” experiment to let future instructors experience inquiry-based learning. I recently (well, last year, but you know…) got the chance to fill in for a colleague…
Making a spinningtop from a metal paper clip
One of my favourite memories of my physics classes at university is of the day when the professor brought in metal paper clips for everybody — to make spinning tops!…
Spinningtop trajectories
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…
How do we make climate predictions? An idea for an outreach activity
Do you need an idea of how to keep your friends and family edutained this holiday season? Then how about using a “mystery tube” to talk about how climate models…
My favorite demonstration of the coolest mixing process: Salt fingering!
I am updating many of my old posts on experiments and combining multiple posts on the same topic to come up with a state-of-the-art post, so you can always find the…
Why does the sun have to be a lot further from us than the moon? A deduction.
Remember the hands-on demo of the phase of the moon? Holding a sphere up in the sunlight in the direction of the moon, the sphere will show the same phase…
Temperature-driven overturning experiment – the easy way
In my last post, I showed you the legendary overturning experiment. And guess what occurred to me? That there is an even easier way to show the same thing. No gel…
A very simple overturning experiment for outreach and teaching
For one of my side-projects I needed higher-resolution photos of the overturning experiment, so I had to redo it. Figured I’d share them with you, too. You know the experiment: gel…
Getting a “feeling” for ocean currents using adrift.org.au
It is very difficult to get a feeling of how fast and how far ocean currents can transport heat, plankton, plastic, or many other properties and things. Even looking at…
Stream lines and paper towels
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…
Guest post: Estimating salinity as a homework assignment
Today I am super excited to share a guest post that my awesome friend Joke Lübbecke wrote for us. Joke is a professor in physical oceanography in Kiel, and we…
More mystery tubes
My mystery tube blog post seems to have inspired a lot of people. How awesome! This is what my parents sent me: And my friend Kristin Richter took the whole thing…
Water bottle & bike pump rocket
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…
Phase of the moon
Relating the phases of the moon to one side of the moon being lit by the sun and the other side being in the dark sometimes appears a bit unintuitive. One thing…
Experiencing constructivism
For a recent workshop on “active learning”, my colleague Timo and I were looking for ways to have participants “experience constructivism”, i.e. show examples of instances that might make conversations…
Developing a hypothesis: Mystery tubes
Finally I know why I’ve been collecting empty toilet paper and kitchen paper rolls for ages: To build mystery tubes! I only built a prototype, but it works just fine.…
When diet coke cans don’t float better than regular coke cans
This is why you should always test an experiment before you run it… On recent travels, when I saw that they were serving drinks out of tiny cans, I asked…
Vortex streets on a plate
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…
Eddies in a jar
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…
Playing with time lapse
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…
Heat engine – drinking bird
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…
Steam boat
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…
Steam-powered spinning top
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,…
Enigma
My friend F and I used to send each other coded messages. Without ever telling each other what cipher was used, though – figuring out how to decipher the message was…
Which displaces more water, a boat with the anchor onboard or in the water?
Not that this is a big effect in the ocean, but still, it’s a nice demo. A body submerges into the water until it displaces an amount of water that is…
Building a miniature well
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…
Fog and clouds in a bottle
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…
Tides in a glass
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…
Ice cubes melting at the bottom of the beakers
Because surely there is one more post in this topic? ;-) For those of you who haven’t heard about the “melting ice cube” obsession of mine, please check out the…
Why folic acid might be good for people, but not so good for tank experiments
I had to do the complete series of experiments, of course… The other day I mentioned that I had used salt from my kitchen for the “ice cubes melting in…
Melting ice cubes, again
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…
Conducting experiments at EMSEA14
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…
The icy elevator
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…
Melting ice cubes reloaded
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…
Thermally driven circulation
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…
Wave interference in a tank
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…
Thermally-driven overturning circulation
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).…
Let’s do the wave! Longitudinal or transversal?
A simple visualization of two types of waves. The FIFA world cup has been over for a while now, but I still need to share an idea I had watching…
Capillary effects
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…
Marsigli’s experiment
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,…
Surface tension and office supplies.
Lots of stuff an be made to float on water just because of surface tension. This morning, I was taking pictures of heaps of waters on coins. I was planning to…
Surface tension – heaps of water.
The classical way of demonstrating surface tension. When talking about surface tension, the classical thing to do is to talk about the shape of drops of water. As seen before…
Vacuum pumps
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…
Bubble size depending on pressure
More playing with a vacuum pump. In this post, we talked about how decreasing the pressure on water can make dissolved gases come out of solution. But what happens if…
Gases dissolved in water
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…
The insulating properties of marshmallows
Ending hot-beverages-week in style. So now we know how to cool down your tea by blowing on it and how to cool it down quickly (or not) by adding milk. So what…
Tea and milk
More physics applications connected to tea. After the frustrations of taking pictures of steam in my last post, I decided that I could use the very same cute mug to…
Blowing on hot tea
Why would it be interesting to talk about this in a science class? As a kid I used to wonder why blowing on a hot soup or beverage should be…
An overturning experiment (part 3)
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…
An overturning experiment (part 2)
How to adapt the same experiment to different levels of prior knowledge. In this post, I presented an experiment that I have run in a primary school, with high-school pupils,…
An overturning experiment
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.…
Modeling the Denmark Strait Overflow
Ha, this is a bad pun. We are modeling the Denmark Strait Overflow – but in a non-numerical, small-scale-and-playdough kind of way. More than a year ago, Kjetil and I ran…
Barometer problem.
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…
Cartesian diver – organic version
Using orange peel as cartesian divers. Guess what my mom told me when we were playing with cartesian divers the other day? That orange peel works really well as a…
Cartesian diver
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…
Non-newtonian fluids.
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…
Molecular diffusion of heat and salt
Why heat and salt diffuse at different rates. Why do heat and salt diffuse at different rates? This seems to always be puzzling students when talking about double diffusion. Well,…
Salt fingering – DIY
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…
Diffusive layering. Or: This is not a trick question!
The “other” double-diffusive mixing process. After having talked extensively about double diffusive mixing in my courses, I tend to assume that students not only remember that there is such thing as…
Salt fingering
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,…
Double-diffusive mixing
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:…
Mediterranean outflow
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…
How sound is refracted towards the regions of minimum speed.
Students acting out the process of sound being refracted towards the region of minimum speed. We’ve been talking about refraction lately. Waves get bent in the direction of lower velocity.…
The broken spoon
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…
Why do we get an Ekman spiral?
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…
Progressive waves on a rope
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…
Why melting sea ice does not contribute to sea level rise.
Simple experiment on why the impact of glaciers and sea ice on sea level, respectively, are not the same. It could be so simple: An ice cube sinks into water…
Measuring temperature.
Students build thermometers. As described in this post, I like to have students build “instruments” to measure the most oceanographic properties (temperature, salinity and density). I find that they appreciate oceanographic…
Measuring density
Students build a device to measure density. As described in this post, I like to have students build “instruments” to measure the most oceanographic properties (temperature, salinity and density). I…
Tasting sea water reloaded
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…
Internal waves in a bottle
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…
How mountains form
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…
A simple DIY tidal model
Instruction for a very simple DIY tidal model. Today, we built a very simple DIY tidal model in class. It consists of two sets of tidal bulges: One locked in…
On the structure of fresh water and salt water ice
More details on the structure of fresh water and salt water ice. Fresh water and salt water ice have very different structures as I already discussed in this post. In the…
Melting ice cubes – what contexts to use this experiment in (post 4/4)
What contexts can the “ice cubes melting in fresh water and in salt water” experiment be used in? As you might have noticed, I really like the “ice cubes melting…
Melting ice cubes – one experiment, many ways (post 3/4)
Different didactical settings in which the “ice cubes melting in fresh and salt water” experiment can be used. In part 1 and 2 of this series, I showed two different…
How much salt is there in sea water?
Visualization of how much salt is actually contained in sea water. When preparing “sea water samples” for class, it is always astonishing to me how much salt I have to…
Properties of sea ice and fresh water ice
Sea ice and fresh water ice have distinctly different properties that can easily be investigated even in big class rooms. In “on how ice freezes from salt water” I talked…
Ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water (post 2/4)
The “ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water” experiment the way I usually use it in class. — Edit — For an updated description of this experiment please…
On how ice freezes from salt water
I’ve been wondering how to best show how sea ice freezes for quite a while. Not just that it freezes, but how brine is rejected. By comparing the structure of…
Ice cubes melting in salt water and freshwater (post 1/4)
Experiment to visualize the effects of density differences on ocean circulation. This is the first post in a series on one of my favorite in-class experiments; I have so much…
Forskningsdagene are almost upon us
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…
Sea surface height and ocean depth
A hands-on activity in which students use real data to find similarities in the sea surface height and the ocean depth along satellite tracks. In yesterday’s GEOF130 class, we explored…
And even more on density
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…
More on density
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…
Tasting sea water
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…