Tag Archives: jellyfish

#WaveWatching, beautiful jellyfish, miniature rip currents, double-diffusive mixing in a Latte

So today I spent a perfect day at the beach in Schilksee, at the mouth of Kiel Bight.

Not a lot of wind (you see the gusts of wind further offshore) but perfect wave watching nevertheless. Look at this beautiful wake!

Here I wanted to take another picture of a wake, but the seagull had already taken off by the time I had my phone ready. Still beautiful though!

And in this picture I just love the geometry.

I have never seen as many jellyfish as today. They were everywhere! So I had to take a selfie.

They look so beautiful, and give such a nice depth to the picture below!

We were watching for quite some time.

And more selfies. But isn’t the jellyfish just amazing?

In the gif on top this post you see it swim, here you have to admire each picture individually :-)

I think they are sooo beautiful!

Coffee break: Double-diffusive layering in a Latte! Super clear layers, so I totally invaded someone else’s personal space AND took pictures of their drink. The things we do for scicomm ;-)

On the way back. It was only around 2:40 when the picture was taken (as you can confirm if you recognize the ferry in the picture), but the light already looks like it’s the evening. And another beautiful wake!

And then, more exciting stuff: Miniature rip currents!

When the water is pulling back, they really become quite strong and impressive and it’s easy to imagine that they get super dangerous really quickly when they are a little larger.

Now with the small waves, they just look beautiful.

And did I ever mention that I looooove waves just before they break?

Have a great evening, everybody!

Jellyfish and capillary waves

Sometimes the best wave watching doesn’t happen how you expect it to happen. Look at this jellyfish, bobbing about in the surface of Kiel fjord. Can you spot the circular wave pattern all around where it breaks the surface? I find this so amazing. Would you have thought that you would spot waves that a jellyfish makes?

Btw, there are other places with capillary waves in this picture, too: In several spots you see thin wave crests, parallel to each other, running in front of a larger wave crest. Those are capillary waves, and the cool thing is that the shorter their wavelength, the faster their propagation. Therefore the larger crests seem to be pushing the smaller ones in front of them, bunching them up over time.