Kiel – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Wave watching on the ferry from Kiel to Oslo!

mglessmer — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 17:13:33 +0000

So I took the ferry from Kiel to Oslo and obviously had to document (most of) the water I saw :-) And now I’m exhausted. Let’s see how much water I’m going to see tomorrow! :)

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A pilot ship making waves, and what happens to the waves over time

mglessmer — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 13:05:23 +0000

This is the story of a pilot ship, merrily sailing along on a beautiful day, making waves. Since it’s windy and Kiel fjord is a little choppy, the waves break and both side of the V-shaped wake with the pilot ship at its tip are visible. See the foam of the breaking waves? And in […]

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Wave watching on Schwentine river

mglessmer — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 05:03:11 +0000

Surprise! I did some wave watching yesterday! Ok, let’s start with something simple to warm you up: A duck’s wake. And wind waves (coming in from the top right) hitting a patch of moss on the side of this little pier, and then radiating away as half circles. Here is a movie of that because […]

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Feathery wake approaching! #WaveWatching in Kiel Holtenau

mglessmer — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 13:05:51 +0000

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 […]

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Ships displace huge amounts of water, and it doesn’t come back immediately when they are gone!

mglessmer — Wed, 29 May 2019 06:24:09 +0000

Last weekend, while wave watching at one of my favourite spots, I observed something curious. Look at the movie below, this is what the turbulent wake of a ship usually looks like right behind the ship: As the ship moves forward through the water, it displaces water and right behind it, it creates a hole […]

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Determining the slope of sea surface via the reflection of a structure

mglessmer — Thu, 09 May 2019 13:05:51 +0000

(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 […]

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Windy days at Holtenau locks: Now THAT’s a turbulent wake!

mglessmer — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 17:04:44 +0000

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 […]

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Moving sandbanks

mglessmer — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 09:34:38 +0000

A while ago I wrote a blog post on how the sand banks in this little creek form. Below you see the picture I showed then: Then, about two weeks ago, I passed that spot again when it was raining, and this is what it looked like: Now we can actually see the flow field, […]

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The building of sand banks

mglessmer — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 11:33:02 +0000

The eroding force of moving water can be seen in so many places when you pay attention. For example in a park where I sometimes go for walks, the really well-maintained paths are forever eroded and washed away by the heavy rains we’ve had recently. In the picture below you see a green pipe opening […]

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