dye – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Did you know that uranine starts fluorescing again when the ice cubes melt?

mglessmer — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 07:10:32 +0000

Yes, I had to test that! :-D Why do I find this exciting? Because that means that a phase change of the water switches fluorescence as a tracer of that water on and off. Or the other way round: Seeing water fluoresce (or not) tells you what state the water is in without having to […]

Source

Did you know uranine doesn’t fluoresce when frozen?

mglessmer — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 07:04:58 +0000

Something else I found out when checking on my ice cubes yesterday: I had frozen a second tray* with ice cubes dyed with uranine (you know, the green stuff I found in the lake near my house the other day?). Like the other ones, they clearly froze back-of-the-freezer-forward, and the most interesting thing to me: Only […]

Source

Update on freezing ice cubes and the temperature distribution in our freezer

mglessmer — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 12:31:01 +0000

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 can never have too many ice cubes for kitchen oceanography!), and then happened to look into the freezer a couple of hours later. And this […]

Source

Sea ice formation, brine release, or: What ice cubes can tell you about your freezer

mglessmer — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 08:32:48 +0000

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 melt in freshwater vs salt water, or for forcing overturning circulations). But the dyed ice cubes tell interesting stories all by themselves, too! Salt water […]

Source

Balances of dyed and un-dyed waters

mglessmer — Sun, 23 Sep 2018 16:02:56 +0000

Oh look, a plume of (almost) un-dyed water hitting the green lake! I am really fascinated by the balance between green water leaking out of the pipeline and into the rain drainage, the rain falling on the lake, and the rain water coming into the lake through the rain drainage system. Right now, the water […]

Source

It’s all about the right equipment: That’s why I now own a UV lamp! I see a lot of fluorescent tracer spotting in my future!

mglessmer — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 15:32:09 +0000

Before I start gushing about my awesome new UV lamp (thanks for encouraging that purchase, Uta! :-)), some other updates on the state of green in the park across the road from my house (don’t know what I am talking about? Check out previous posts on the fluorescent dye tracer). The lake is still bright […]

Source

The icy elevator

mglessmer — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 04:55:07 +0000

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 fresh water experiment? It is really difficult to see in the picture below (sorry!) but you can probably spot the ice cube floating at the […]

Source