Tag: mixing

It has been a long time in the making, but finally we have a nice fjord circulation in our tank! Pierre and I tried to improve it 6 years ago, Steffi, Ailin and I have been working on it for a couple of days last August, then finally this morning, Steffi and I tried again — […]

When setting up the stratification for the Nansen “dead water” demo (that we’ll show later today, and until then I am not allowed to share any videos, sorry!), I went into a meeting after filling in layer 4 (the then lowest). When I came back, I wanted to fill in layer 5 as the new […]

Sometimes sitting in a café for a work meeting with #lieblingskollegin Julia can lead to unexpected discoveries of oceanographic processes — in my latte! It’s those little things that inspire blog posts… “Kitchen oceanography” brings the ocean to your house or class room! Oceanography is often taught in a highly theoretical way without much reference to […]

As you might have noticed, the last couple of days I have been super excited to play with the large tanks at GFI in Bergen. But then there are also simple kitchen oceanography experiments that need doing that you can bring into your class with you, like for example one showing that tides and internal waves […]

A wind stress is applied to the surface of a stratified and a non-stratified tank to cause mixing. This is a pretty impressive experiment to run if you have a lot of time, or to watch the time-lapse of if you don’t. The idea is that a density stratification will make mixing harder than it […]

My friends know me well. Especially A&I, which was proven again when they sent me the link to an article about two things that I am mildly obsessed with: Latte and double-diffusive mixing. My obsession with latte is a fairly recent thing, but I have been known to blog about interesting convection pattern in it […]

Even though most people think I am crazy, I always love watching the convection pattern develop in a hot drink.

I am updating many of my old posts on experiments and combining multiple posts on the same topic to come up with a state-of-the-art post, so you can always find the best materials on here. And today I would like to present you my favorite experiment: Salt fingering! Check out the new page I made for […]

A wind stress is applied to the surface of a stratified and a non-stratified tank to cause mixing. This is an experiment that Martin and I ran at the JuniorAkademie this summer, but since I posted soooo much back than (just look for the tag “JuniorAkademie” to get an impression of what we did) I feel […]

A wind stress is applied to the surface to cause mixing. This is an experiment that I have been wanting to do for a long time, but somehow it never worked out before. But last night Martin and I finally ran it! We ran two experiments, one after the other. In the first one, we […]

Density-driven flow. The experiment presented in this post was first proposed by Marsigli in 1681. It illustrates how, despite the absence of a difference in the surface height of two fluids, currents can be driven by the density difference between the fluids. A really nice article by Soffientino and Pilson (2005) on the importance of the Bosporus […]

How to easily set up the stratification for the salt fingering process. Setting up stratifications in tanks is a pain. Of course there are sophisticated methods, but when you want to just quickly set something up in class (or in your own kitchen) you don’t necessarily want to go through the whole hassle of a […]

The “other” double-diffusive mixing process. After having talked extensively about double diffusive mixing in my courses, I tend to assume that students not only remember that there is such thing as double-diffusive mixing, but that they also remember our discussions on how the process works, and that they would be able to transfer this to processes […]

How to show my favorite oceanographic process in class, and why. As I mentioned in this post, I have used double-diffusive mixing extensively in my teaching. For several reasons: Firstly, I think that the process is just really cool (watch the movie in this post and tell me that it isn’t!!!) and that the experiments […]

On the coolest process in oceanography. My favorite oceanographic process, as all of my students and many of my acquaintances know, is double-diffusive mixing. Look at how awesome it is: Double-diffusive mixing happens because heat and salt’s molecular diffusion are very different: Heat diffuses about a factor 100 faster than salt. This can lead to […]