About a week ago, I went on a lovely walk with my parents, and here are the pictures. How I love the beach! As I am looking more at ripples in the sand, I am seeing them everywhere now. Below, we are looking at a little area on the beach (the water would be just […]
Minutes after drawing the illustration to the “you are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop” quote I shared yesterday in the most beautiful sunshine, the sky started looking like this. Luckily I had a nice spot from which I could observe what happened next… …lots of drops. In […]
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 […]
Whenever I get out of my house and it looks like this, I am slightly disappointed because it means that the wave watching that morning will not be ideal. I mean, I like colorful sunrises as much as the next person, buuuut… Today, at least, the fog was kinda interesting, also because there was a […]
When I go wave watching back home in Kiel, I tend to be drawn to other places than this particular one, but sometimes you find gold in the places you least expect it. And then, what is usually a really nice and easy to explain kind of wave — shallow water waves — acts up […]
These very long and regular wave crests were caused by a ship — they are one side of the V of a ship’s wake that’s about to reach the sea wall here. I love how well defined the wave crests are — on one side you see the reflection of the bollards and the bright […]
A week ago already, Frauke and I went on an evening walk in Kiel Holtenau. Beautiful wave watching to be done there as always! Here you see the one side of a ship’s V-shaped wake approaching our vantage point. You can see the individual “feathers” of the wake: Short wave crests, all parallel to each […]
Wakes are always interesting to watch. But usually, I am showing wakes of ships going straight ahead. So today, I have something cool for you: The wake of a ship doing a 90 degree turn! And what that does is that the feathery wake that is usually V-shaped now gets deformed! And this deformation of […]
I’m lucky to have great friends like Alice, who was spontaneous enough to go on a mini cruise with me today (for which I was only given tickets when I was already on my way to meet her somewhere else). So we boarded the historic MS Stadt Kiel and the adventure began! (Note the Europe […]
Yesterday, I took some pretty pictures of a red balloon floating on Kiel fjord, some seagulls swimming close to it, and — of course, most importantly — the seagull’s waves. You see some that they just made where you can still see how they relate to where they are swimming now. But then there are […]
The title says it all, I guess ;-) In the picture above, you can still see the ship on the left, and having seen the ship, I am sure you can recognise the turbulent wake in the picture below, too: It’s the lighter blue stripe towards the horizon with darker, rougher sea surface to either […]
(Disclaimer: The physics the title refers to are somewhere in the second half of the blog post when I am done rambling) In case you are wondering why I am blogging so much all of a sudden: Sometimes I just love to spend a couple of hours on my sofa, drink something warm, and play […]
Here is a puzzle for you. Walking along a beach, first, the waves looked like this: One wave breaking at a time. That’s the situation you also see in the foreground of the picture below, while in the background, a little further down the beach, something else starts happening. If we look closely at that […]
Now that the weather is nice and sunny again, here is what it looked like only last Saturday. It wasn’t even really stormy, but windy enough so that the ships leaving the locks at Kiel Holtenau were working a lot harder than usual. Especially difficult when you are almost empty and then there is a […]
When it’s all foggy and there are hardly any waves, sometimes help comes from the most unexpected places. Today: condensation trails that are reflected on the water! Isn’t it interesting to see how depending on the angle of the trails waves show up a lot or hardly at all? The condensation trail on the right […]
I just love this picture: The two boats in the front are going at the same speed (the trainer is driving right next to the person in the row boat over a long distance), yet look at how different the two ships’ wakes look! The motor boat has this huge, breaking, turbulent wake. Even though […]
Looking at Kiel fjord in the picture below, it is quite obvious from the shape of the waves that those waves are some ship’s wake. Why is that obvious? Because the waves a) have a very short wavelength for their height, and b) are also all of the same wavelength. What I mean by that […]
Do you see those weird traces going away from us, perpendicular to the wave crests, but in parallel to the bright stripes on the sea floor (I talked about those in yesterday’s post), looking almost like waves but not quite? What’s going on there? Something very cool! :-) In the gif below, I have drawn […]
After talking a lot about turbulent wakes this week, here are two pictures of different kinds of wakes. They are of course turbulent, too, but on a very different scale. In the picture above, see how you see pairs of eddies on either side of the row boat’s wake? That’s where the oars were in […]
Usually I look at wakes when ships are long gone, or at least leaving. Today, let’s look at one where the ship is coming towards us and we see how a bow wave turns into the feathery V-shaped wake! That’s actually all I want to say today. Except look at how well you see where […]
You might have noticed that in today’s first post there was a lot less water in the Kiel fjord than in yesterday’s post (starting this year strong on the blogging front! I like it! And don’t worry, I won’t be keeping up this pace :-D). But look how little water there actually is! In the picture above […]
Guess the title says it all today ;-) Just kidding. Below you see a movie of a neat interference pattern I observed this morning. The situation is similar to yesterday in that the ferry has sailed past and the wake runs up on those bathing steps. But: today it’s quite windy and the wind waves’ crests […]
Ending 2018 in style and exactly the way I want to continue in 2019: wave watching and dipping into Kiel fjord! 2018 has been an exciting year and a lot of changes that will shape 2019 to be very different from anything I have ever done before have already been set in motion. But despite […]
Last night it rained a lot. So the first thing to do this morning was to check what that had done to my green lake! The dye is now a lot more diluted, but overall it still looks surprisingly green seeing that there is a lot of rain water draining into the lake. To give […]
Yes, you read that correctly. The German Society for Chemistry and Physics Education (GDCP)’s annual conference started out with a 2 hour cruise on Kiel fjord, during which the participants had the opportunity to choose between enjoying the sunshine and just doing whatever they liked, and several “guided tours” on either the sights of Kiel […]
So many people are surprised when I speak of wave watching as of a “real activity”. But to me it is! So I am going to talk you through a couple of minutes I spent looking out on the water where the Kiel Canal meets the Kiel fjord, right outside the locks at Kiel Holtenau. […]
Last week, we ran an “expedition learning” course for 17-year olds. They were separated into several groups, working on different topics, and mine (unsurprisingly) worked on waves. You can see here what kind of stuff we observed when first testing the stretch of coastline we wanted to do our expedition to. And now you’ll get […]
When I said that wake watching made me happy last week, did you really think those were all the wakes I was going to show you? Ha! No, I have plenty more! :-) Today, I want to show you a couple that have one thing in common: the way that they show up against the […]
The best ship-watching of the year happens during Kiel Week (even if I do a fair bit of ship-watching year round ;-)) But this year, I was absolutely fascinated with wake-watching. Look at the sailing ship below and its beautiful wake! You very clearly see the streak directly behind the boat, caused by turbulence where […]
The locks at Kiel canal always make for interesting weekend strolls. I love watching ships! Especially armed with my favourite app, VesselFinder (similar to marine traffic described here), because it let’s me anticipate which ships will come next. And because I love my new hat! :-)
Let me tell you the story of the picture below. I was walking along Kiel fjord with some friends and we saw this mama duck with all those tiny cute ducklings. We stopped and oooo’d and aaaaa’d and they were just so adorable!! But the after a while they swam on and we continued walking. […]
When I was talking about foam stripes the other day, you might have noticed that the foam stripe wasn’t a foam stripe all the way, but became “just a stripe”. And since I have been thinking about surfactants a lot recently, I think that’s actually what we are seeing in places where the stripe is […]
I really like it when waves reach a sea wall at an angle, because the resulting criss-cross looks so cool :-) And especially cool when you see it gradually building up, like below where the sea wall is partly protected by the gravel (or whatever you call those heaps of stones running in parallel to […]
One sunny morning, I noticed The Stripe again: Running all the way up and down the coast. In places where there is a large fetch the stripe is clearly foamy: But looking downwind from the pier the picture above was taken from, the foam stripe becomes just a stripe! And looking in the same direction, […]
The KiFo owns a ROV that — until now — has never been fully operational. But since I like a challenge (and have a really skilled research assistant who really deserves all the credit) it’s working again! We first went to test it in a tiny lake on campus. This was exciting enough, since it seemed […]
In July I will be involved in teaching an “expedition learning” course for a week. It will be all about coastal protection in the Kiel region, so two colleagues and I went on a private expedition to scout out what can be explored where. This is a very picture-heavy post, be warned! It’s more a note-to-self […]
I recently googled for something related to the shape of waves and came across a photo of a wave that caught my eye, and it took me to a journey that lead to the article “nonlinear shallow ocean wave soliton interactions on flat beaches” by Ablowitz and Baldwin (2012). What’s discussed in that article is that while […]
As you might have noticed, I am getting a little obsessed with those foam stripes. Another day, a little more wind, looking up the coast: And down the coast… Do you notice the irregularities in the foam stripe in the pictures above? Those are the places where, in much calmer weather, you see the funny […]
I think I might be getting closer to understanding the foam stripe mystery. Remember how we’ve always observed them going in parallel to the coast? Yesterday I saw this again, looking up the coast in one direction… …and down the other direction. I’ve had the hypothesis that they might be somehow related to Langmuir circulation, […]
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 […]
No matter how often I’ve seen it, I still find it absolutely fascinating how the tiniest structures can have a really visible effect on the downwind wave field. Like for example that pier below, leading to the little hut at the end. There is probably a meter and a half between the water surface and […]
I was waking along Kiel fjord one morning and noticed a stone “jump” on the ground as waves went over it (and actually, that observation was the motivation to dive into stuff from the last post, too). I think the stone only looked so curious because the rest of the ground was uniformly sandy and hence […]
I think I might be getting obsessed with those stripes parallel to the coast. We saw them as foam stripes, eel grass stripes and now today: leaf stripes! Or should it be leaves stripes instead of leaf stripes? Interestingly enough, that day there wasn’t just one stripe, but in some places there were even two. It’s […]
All you regular readers of my book and my blog surely recognize what’s going on below? Yes! A wave field comes in at an angle to the pier and gets reflected, leading to a chequered pattern. And a second wave field comes in with wave crests pretty much parallel to the pier, adding a little […]
Wavelength dependency of wave-object-interactions. What a title! :-) But that is exactly what I observed over the enormous timespan of three full minutes (as shown by the time stamps of my camera) when I went strolling along Kiel Fjord one Saturday morning. First, I saw this old, overgrown tyre in a wave field that was […]
When we think about reflections in water, we usually think of calm lakes and trees on the shore opposite to us. Or clouds. Or at least that’s what I think of: Everything is so far away, that it seems to be reflected at an axis that is a horizontal line far away from us. Then the […]
On Tuesday I talked about sea weed accumulating close to the sea wall in Kiel fjord, and I showed you the picture below. One thing that I found really interesting about that is how the floating sea weed dampens out all the waves. You can see it in the image above, bit it might be […]
I recently got a new comment on my blog post on foam stripes parallel to the coast, and since you guys hardly ever comment on my blog (I like getting your emails! Really! But why not comment on here? ;-)) it spiked my interest enough to look out for more foam stripes. So about a […]
