Today I present to you another artefact stemming from my new social media habits (browsing bluesky on the bus to work in the morning, usually finding at least one article that I then read; combined with not posting to Instagram or Facebook any more and instead dumping all my (n)ice pictures directly here on my […]
Climbing the steps out of the water after an ice dip lets me see the world from a different perspective. Instead of focussing on not slipping and on controlling my breath on the way down, on the way up I can linger, observe, and document. Building such small (or larger) moments into life and work, […]
Back in December, I did a takeover of the Instagram account of WissKommSquad, a community of german science communicators. I translated it over new years, but somehow never published it. I have since taken tons of much better pictures of snowflakes, but the story I’m telling here is still interesting, I think: How snow and […]
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 super excited (not only because as of now, April 15th, it has 70 retweets and 309 likes. That’s orders of magnitude more successful than any […]
And now we’ve reached the heights where there is fresh snow! And also where there are wild rivers. Don’t know which I find more exciting :-) Ok, yeah, it’s definitely the rivers that I find more exciting. Also, isn’t it funny that at first glance, the river seems to be flowing left-to-right, because that’s the […]
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 be discussed on the basis of this experiment. Context Audience This hands-on experiment is suited for many different audiences and can be used to achieve a wealth […]
Waves going through very fresh, still flexible ice. What an exciting topic :-) We had a first look at the picture below in the last blog post already, when we looked at stages of ice formation. Can you see how the pancakes are deformed by waves going through? It’s a little more difficult to see […]
One thing I really like is watching ice form. Well, maybe not watching the actual freezing (don’t have the attention span for that) but looking at all the different stages. At first, you have all the small, individual needles that still slush around. Then, the needles start sticking together, and if there is a little […]
One of my favourite phenomena right now is desublimition, or deposition: The phase transition of water vapour to ice that doesn’t go through the liquid phase. It happens when moist air is cooled below the dew point and condensation doesn’t occur spontaneously: When the supercooled water vapour then gets in touch with a cold surface, […]
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 again. And there you have it: Water-ice crystals all over your lovely ice cream! Completely annoying because, obviously, they only taste like water and mess […]
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 and teach part of a workshop that prepares teaching staff for using inquiry-based learning in their own teaching. My part was to bring in an experiment […]
Frost flowers! I learned about those in the context of Arctic and Antarctic ice formation. I kinda assumed that ice flowers only formed in salt water, because I remember hearing about how the ice needles that form wick up brine and that, due to their large surface (which you will remember noticing in the last post where […]
What happens when water vapour freezes to ice without going through the liquid phase? Frost flowers!!! That’s when trees suddenly look like this: Btw – the stem of that tree is painted white! That’s just to confuse you a little but… But let’s take a closer look. This is what the branches look like: Tiny […]
For most of my readers it might be pretty obvious what the movement of floating ice says about the flow field “below”, but most “normal” people would probably not even notice that there is something to see. So I want to present a couple of pictures and observations today to help you talk to the people around […]
My friend Elin is currently on a research cruise in Antarctica and you really need to check out her blog. She is writing about life at sea, including the most beautiful photos of sea ice. Today’s post is called “ice or no ice” and describes the first couple of days of the research cruise. Elin combines […]
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 pads! (BUT! And that is a BIG BUT! Melting of ice cubes in lukewarm water is NOT the process that drives the “real” overturning! For […]
My new favorite thing is to put strawberries through a blender and then freeze small portions of that to eat as ice cream later. It is super yummy plus you never know what you’ll see when you open the lid! Sometimes, you get long crystals like these: And then other times, you get something completely […]
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 links to other posts at the end of this post. For everybody else’s sake, let’s dive right in! When Kristin and I ran the workshop […]
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 fresh and salt water” experiment, and that that salt was the super healthy one that was both iodized and containing folic acid. And what happened […]
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 should set a timer and a ruler next to the beakers for scale. The background and timer I did something about, but the ruler I […]
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 Educator’s Association Meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden. There is quite an active Twitter crowd around, so you can follow the storyfied meeting or look out for […]
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 I haven’t written about in a long time, even though (or possibly: because) I wrote a whole series about it last year (see links at […]
Guest post by Kristin Richter! Today I’m excited to bring to you a guest post from Innsbruck, Austria, written by my friend Kristin Richter. Kristin ran the oceanography lab in Bergen before I took over, and she is a total enabler when it comes to deciding between playing with water, ice and food dye, or doing “real” […]
Is there an equation of state for hypersaline water at very cold temperatures? A friend of mine is looking to calculate changes in density of a hypersaline Antarctic lake from summer to winter. Apparently, this lake is about 10 times saltier than the ocean and often cools down to -17C at the bottom. My own spontaneous […]
When students have read blog posts of mine before doing experiments in class, it takes away a lot of the exploration. Since I was planning to blog about the CMM31 course, I had told students that I often blogged about my teaching and asked for their consent to share their images and details from our […]
Some photos to illustrate the early stages of ice formation. When I was showing my ice formation pictures the other day (also in this post), I realized that even though I talk about ice forming needles first, I had never actually taken pictures of that. So when I went down to the fjord this morning […]
Ice formation in the ocean – using my own photos to tell the story. Recently I talked about using my own photo to explain the generation of wind-generated waves to students. And then I realized that there is another set of photos that I have been using for teaching purposes for years that I could […]
Using a photo from one of my research cruises to explain the formation of wind waves. Wind waves are (surprise coming up!) waves generated by wind that blows over the ocean’s surface. The size of those waves depends on several factors: The strength of the wind, the length of time the wind has been blowing […]
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 image above you see that the structures are very different. Whereas fresh water ice is clear and transparent, salt water ice has a porous structure […]
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 ways of using the “ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water” experiment in lectures. Today I want to back up a little bit […]
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 a bit about how dye was rejected when I tried to produce colored ice cubes for another experiment. But even non-colored ice that were made […]
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 go to this page! — Edit — You might remember the “ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water experiment” from a couple of […]
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 fresh water and salt water ice, one can get an idea of how that is happening (and I’ll write a post on that after we […]
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 to say about it that we’ll have to break it up into several posts. Post 1 (this post) will present one setup of the experiment, […]
