ice Archives - Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Currently reading To (2025) on “Feedback partnerships: strengthening students’ proactive recipience through co-creating dialogic feedback”

February 18, 2025

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…

Ice watching and thinking about reflections — in the water, and in Harvey et al. (2025)’s article

February 17, 2025

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…

#WaveWatchingWednesday

February 17, 2021

Haven’t posted a #WaveWatchingWednesday in a while — but I am very regularly posting over on my Instagram @fascinocean_kiel. Check it out if you fancy a more regular supply of…

Insta takeover on snowflake formation

February 14, 2021

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.…

24 Days of #KitchenOceanography — Resublimation

December 20, 2020

24 Days of #KitchenOceanography — Crystal structure of ice

December 19, 2020

24 Days of #KitchenOceanography — Fresh water and salt water ice crystal structure

December 18, 2020

24 Days of #KitchenOceanography — Melting ice cubes!

December 4, 2020

24 Days of #KitchenOceanography — Layers in the ocean

December 1, 2020

Brine rejection and overturning, but not the way you think! Guest post by Robert Dellinger

April 16, 2020

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…

Kiel to Bergen, the mini series. Part 14, in which we are in the snowy part of Bergensbanen minutt for minutt

October 1, 2019

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…

Experiment: Ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water

July 23, 2018

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…

Ice and waves

February 2, 2017

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…

Ice forming on Kiel fjord

January 31, 2017

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.…

Desublimation: When water vapour freezes to ice without becoming liquid in between

January 12, 2017

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…

Frost flowers on ice cream: When you start thinking about phenomena and something really annoying, all of a sudden, becomes really cool.

June 23, 2016

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…

Ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water. By Mirjam S. Glessmer

Using the “melting ice cube” experiment to let future instructors experience inquiry-based learning.

April 5, 2016

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…

Frost flowers on the ice of the Schlei in Schleswig. By Mirjam S. Glessmer

Frost flowers – when water vapour freezes to ice without going through the liquid phase. Examples “at sea”

February 9, 2016

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…

Frost flowers – when water vapour freezes to ice without going through the liquid phase. Examples on land

February 4, 2016

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…

Ice on Elbe river in Hamburg. By Mirjam S. Glessmer

Reading ice on a river as tracer for flow fields

January 21, 2016

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…

Can you make “boring” math or physics exciting by relating it to the adventures of a research cruise in Antarctic? Elin can!

January 11, 2016

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…

Temperature-driven overturning experiment – the easy way

November 6, 2015

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…

Strawberry ice cream crystals

August 12, 2015

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…

Ice cubes melting at the bottom of the beakers

October 13, 2014

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

October 6, 2014

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

October 3, 2014

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

October 1, 2014

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…

Melting ice cubes reloaded

September 26, 2014

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…

Help! Weird ice crystals

July 18, 2014

Geli, Torge, and all you other ice people – do you know what this is? Browsing pictures on my phone, I came across the pictures below that I took a…

Guest post: The mystery of the cold room

April 30, 2014

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…

Help! Equation of State?

February 17, 2014

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…

Ice can flow like ketchup

October 15, 2013

Check out the very nice article “ice can flow like ketchup” by Clemens Spensberger on ClimateSnack.com. Enjoy!

Dangers of blogging, or ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water

October 1, 2013

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…

Early stages of ice formation

September 30, 2013

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…

Ice in the ocean – my historical photos

September 16, 2013

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…

A fetching title for a fetching photo post

September 13, 2013

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…

On the structure of fresh water and salt water ice

September 11, 2013

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 – one experiment, many ways (post 3/4)

September 7, 2013

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…

Properties of sea ice and fresh water ice

September 5, 2013

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)

September 4, 2013

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

September 2, 2013

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)

September 1, 2013

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…

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