My friend Pierré and I started working on this article when both of us were still working at the Geophysical Institute in Bergen. It took forever to get published, mainly because both of us had moved on to different jobs with other foci, so maybe it’s not a big deal that it took me over […]
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 a long time, their effectiveness as an educational tool are sometimes questioned. For, despite students’ ability to produce correct answers to standard questions regarding these […]
This blog post was written for Elin Darelius & team’s blog (link) which you should totally follow if you aren’t already! — We have started rotating and filling water into our 13-meter-diameter rotating tank! So exciting! Pictures of that to come very soon. But first things first: Why do we go to the trouble of […]
We’ve been thinking about Coriolis deflection a lot recently (see links at the end of this post). But this weekend, at Phaenomenta Flensburg, I came across a so-called “Coriolis fountain”. A fountain that you can put into spin and that then changes shape like so: Uta, remember we talked about this a couple of years […]
Some demonstrations are really not as clever as we thought they might be. We have talked about how to teach aspects of the Coriolis force recently, and just to spice it up: here is one thing that I tried that totally didn’t work out. The idea was to have one student slowly and steadily turn a […]
So how do we teach about the Coriolis force? The following is a shortened version of an article that Pierre de Wet and I wrote when I was still in Bergen, check it out here. The Coriolis demonstration A demonstration observing a body on a rotating table from within and from outside the rotating system […]
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 to show you a quick movie on how the seemingly paradox situation of moving in one frame of reference, yet not moving in another, can […]
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 oceanography: The Coriolis force. The most difficult step in understanding the Coriolis force is accepting that whether or not a trajectory appears straight or curved […]
