JuniorAkademie – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Fictitious forces (1/5): Record players and Coriolis deflection

mglessmer — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 09:06:36 +0000

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 […]

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The effects of rotation on a collapsing column

mglessmer — Fri, 12 Sep 2014 05:12:06 +0000

Comparing a rotating and non-rotating dipole. I just realized that I never explicitly showed the difference between rotation and no rotation, even though I do have the footage to do so: Two experiments set up to create a monopole, which both turned dipole. In the non-rotating experiment (which was, by the way, set up carefully in […]

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Simulations of hetonic explosions

mglessmer — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 05:32:41 +0000

Because sometimes it’s easier to control a computer than rotation, salinity, water and dye. After looking at a non-rotating cylinder collapse the other day, it is time to look at proper hetonic explosions (you know? The experiment on the rotating tank where a denser column of water at the center of the tank is released when […]

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Collapsing column

mglessmer — Mon, 08 Sep 2014 07:31:45 +0000

Or: This is what happens to a hetonic explosion experiment without rotation. I’ve posted a lot while at JuniorAkademie a while back, so it is hard to believe there are still experiments from that time that I haven’t shown you. But I’ve probably only shown you about half the experiments we’ve done, and there are plenty more […]

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Double overflow

mglessmer — Sat, 30 Aug 2014 04:15:00 +0000

Because sometimes one overflow simply isn’t enough. Finn’s group came up with – and ran – an overflow experiment with many different densities and even more colors. While the movie didn’t turn out too well, the idea was pretty awesome. Rolf went ahead and modeled the experiment right away. And because the plume didn’t go across […]

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Cylinder collapse on a cone

mglessmer — Fri, 29 Aug 2014 10:59:06 +0000

Water running uphill during spin-down – how much more awesome can it get? After hours, when all but the most curious students had left, Rolf and I ran another collapsing cylinder experiment, this time on Rolf’s old disk player turned rotating table. Rolf has a cone-inset for the round tank, and we set a cylinder […]

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Tagebuch – Tag 7

mglessmer — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 19:42:51 +0000

Von Carolin und Marie Am heutigen Tage wurden auch das Salz, die Dichte und die Wellen endgültig überführt. Das, was jetzt noch alles abschließt, ist die morgige Gerichtsverhandlung. Darauf haben sich alle Detektive genauestens vorbereitet und sie haben sich überlegt, wer welche Beweise im Gerichtssaal vorstellt. Genauere Details werden aber Morgen noch geklärt. Die Salzüberführung […]

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Salt fingering

mglessmer — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 15:56:46 +0000

My absolute favorite experiment ever: salt fingering. I know I’ve said it before about another experiment, even today, but this is my absolute favorite experiment and I still get endlessly fascinated. I’ve written about salt fingering before, and given tips on run the experiment, but today we tried a different setup. We used the same […]

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Hetonic explosion

mglessmer — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 13:59:12 +0000

Trying to tweak conditions to force a set number of vortices. We’ve done the hetonic explosion again. This time the group was super careful to calculate the Rossby radius correctly, and then to set up the experiment accordingly. We aimed for a single column like in our tilting of a frontal surface under rotation experiment. We […]

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Thermally driven circulation

mglessmer — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 11:18:06 +0000

One of my all-time favorite experiments. The salt group got a bit bored from watching ice cubes melt, so I suggested they look at temperature differences for a change, and they ran the “leaking bottles” experiment. Watch a movie combining their four different setups below! [vimeo 104599967]

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