Mirjam Sophia Glessmer

Category: observation

Solar eclipse!

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…
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Turbulence watching

I am super excited by how the upper-left-to-lower-right plane‘s turbulence is visible in the destruction of the awesome feathery remnants of the middle-left-to-slightly-up-on-the-right plane’s condensation trail. Bonus: that bird!
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Sea urchin & star fish

At work (at the Kieler Forschungswerkstatt) there are a couple of fish tanks with interesting stuff in them. I made these videos ages ago but just thought I’d share them…
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Wakes of ducks

I really like observing the wakes of ducks. Much easier to watch than those of ships because the scale is much more person-standing-on-the-sea-wall friendly. Also much less turbulence messing up the…
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Burning foam

One weekend, my godson’s family took me to the Explorado Duisburg, Germany’s largest museum for kids. And one thing we learned there was to make foam that you can ignite…
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Optics

I’ve even talked about it on this blog before, but I find it still fascinating how every tiny droplet manages to flip the world upside down :-)
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Estimating volumes

Good thing laboratory equipment is always labeled with the volume! Even though I have played plenty with Legos as a child and am fairly good at 3D stuff, my mind…
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Erosion

Erosion happens not only to sandy paths or beaches on the large scale, but also on a small scale to really sturdy structures like the groynes in Hastings, where each…
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Tides

Another thing I can’t stop being fascinated by: Tides. Sometimes you look towards Hastings Pier, and there is water all the way up to the sea wall. Those are the…
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Refraction of light in water

How deep is the pool? Really looks like it is super flat, doesn’t it? It’s not, it’s almost shoulder-deep (if you aren’t taller than me ;-)) Even though I’ve known about…
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Jan Mayen picture dump

I’ve been thinking about that one research cruise in 2012 (Cruise webpage: “Greenland’s frozen coast”) where we passed Jan Mayen and had the chance to see the amazing coast line…
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Granular convection

What is wrong with this picture? Don’t you guys make your parents stop the car when you drive by newly built walls in random villages somewhere when they are a…
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Raindrops on water

I’ve been trying to take good pictures of drops falling on water for a while now, but somehow it always ends up meh-ish. These kind of situations look so pretty…
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Wave train

When you look at waves, do you sometimes notice the train of smaller waves being pushed forward by the “main” wave? That has always fascinated me. Kind of like in the center of…
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Amplifying waves

A pier full of sail boats, perpendicular to the prevailing wave direction, and voila: Instant demonstration of an amplified wave! Look at how the masts show a transversal wave: Maybe…
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Fetch and wind waves

Summer holidays in beautiful Cornwall – what more can you ask for? If only these pictures weren’t from last year… Anyway, one can dream. And one can find awesome oceanography…
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Creating eddies

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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Curvature of the Earth

In Ratzeburg, we very much enjoyed our daily early morning swims. One thing that is really nice to observe when you are swimming in a calm lake is how things…
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Rainbows and prisms

Lets go back and talk about one of my favorite non-oceanographic topics: Rainbows! When I had my rainbow phase about a year ago, my mom sent me the movie below, which shows what…
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Duck trajectories

I’m sure I’ve talked about stream lines and streak lines and all the other kinds of lines that you learn about in hydrodynamics at some point. The other day I saw…
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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…
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Streak lines?

A common problem in hydrodynamics is to distinguish between all the different kinds of lines that characterize a flow field: Stream lines, streak lines, path lines, time lines, and probably…
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Thermoplastic ketchup bottles

After all those text-heavy posts this week, here is something that really fascinated me recently. I had an empty ketchup bottle lying in my sink when I strained some pasta.…
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Drops and a pool

Sometimes I am so glad to have this blog, just because it gives me permission to do things like film drops falling from a wet life vest into a pool…
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Centrifugal governor

One of the advantages of working at a university: You always find people who enjoy playing :-) Last summer, I visited the ThinkTank museum in Birmingham. I already posted about…
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Continuity

What do you see when you look at an aquarium? When I was in Gothenburg last year for EMSEA14, one night we got to hang out at the Sjöfartsmuseet Akvariet there,…
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Simple pendulum

Because physics is everywhere! Happy New Year, everybody! Hope you all had a good break and are excited to start lots of exciting projects in 2015! One project I will definitely…
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Sun dogs

More refraction of light. Recently I found myself on the ferry from Kiel to Gothenburg, watching the sun rise. Next to the sun, I noticed a piece of a rainbow.…
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Awesome fountain Birmingham

Because water is endlessly fascinating. As those of you who know me in person are acutely aware – I am traveling too much right now. Hence the content on this…
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Sun halo

A rainbow that isn’t one, technically speaking. Browsing through the photos on my phone, I came across the one below that I took two years ago in Bergen. I remember taking…
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Wake of a house.

Am I weird for noticing that kind of stuff? When I posted that picture of the fountain in the last post, it very strongly reminded me of a breakfast my sister and I…
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Wind shear.

Wind going in different directions at different heights. Apparently some people were intrigued by the white mist they saw on the last picture in my last post (below). First, let…
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Lava

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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Mid-Atlantic Ridge

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge above sea level in Iceland. On my recent trip to Iceland, I had to seize the opportunity to take pictures of plate tectonics at work. Imagining oceanic…
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Geysers

Photos and movies from geysers on Iceland. I already talked about hydrothermal activity in this post. But then after writing it, we went and did the golden circle tour and…
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