Tag Archives: refraction

Refraction of light in moving water — why stuff seems to be jumping around

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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 didn’t seem to move.

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So seeing that jumping stone made me want to draw the optical path, which I’ve animated for you here:

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Funny. I think in physics class in school, I would absolutely have hated it had I gotten the task to draw all those different diagrams, and here I really enjoyed it. Maybe because of that jumping stone? Would the right motivation have helped me as a kid to get interested in this? I think it wasn’t that I was not interested in physics, but it would never have occurred to me to sit down on my own to sketch optical paths or anything like that. Now if I could figure out what changed for me, maybe we could use that to make other people interested in physics, too?

Refraction of light in water — looking at a couple of examples

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Looking at how light gets refracted when it enters water is always fascinating. There are a dozen blog posts on the topic on this blog alone, but let me talk about it again today.

In a 1908 article, Charles Judd (as summarised in Barnett & Ceci, 2002) describes an experiment where kids throw darts at a target submerged under water. Half of the kids, in addition to practicing throwing darts, are taught about refraction of light in water. While all kids do equally well on the practice task, the kids that understand the physics do a lot better when the water depth was changed. Why?

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When the water depth changes, the target appears to be located in a different position than before. With shallower water, the target we see is a lot closer to the real location of the target. So kids that did not understand why they had to aim at a position off the target they saw to actually hit the target had a much harder time adjusting the way they aimed than those kids who actually understood what had changed.

But refraction is always cool to look at, even without throwing stuff. Here a picture from one of my very first blog posts (still in my house in Norway).

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“broken spoon”

Or from this blog post — a fountain in Sheffield:

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Or a swimming pool in Lüneburg that appears a lot shallower than it actually is (from this blog post).

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Or a table that gets completely deformed when seen through a glass of water (from this post).

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Refraction of light in water.

Is it only me or do other people sometimes also draw optical paths just for fun? ;-)

Another wave hunt expedition: Learning to discover ocean physics wherever you go

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One of my favourite topics right now: Learning to “see” ocean physics wherever you go. For example here: A visit to my goddaughter in Schleswig, and this time we are practicing all she and her mom read about in MY BOOK (and if you have good ideas for a title for that book, please let me know!). So today I’m showing you pictures of phenomena similar to those in my book, but discovered on this recent visit.

For example diffraction when waves pass this pier:

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In the image below, I’m showing what I mean: Waves coming in from the right have straight crests (red). As they pass the pier, they get diffracted and bent around (green).

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In this spot, this phenomenon can be seen on most days. I wrote about it before, but I have more pictures from previous visits, where the same thing happens in the opposite direction, too: Waves propagating in from the left and being bent around the pier to the right.

Or we can see other wave crests, meeting a rock that breaks the water’s surface.

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Those waves (shown in red in the image below) get reflected from the rock, and circular waves radiate away from the rock (green).

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A similar thing can also be observed from a flag moored out in the water:

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This time, incoming waves are green and the circular waves radiating off the flag are red.

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And we also got to see awesome criss-crossing again, albeit in a different spot:

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Here we have the red wave crests coming in, and the green reflections.

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If we look at it from a little more distance, we can also see another phenomenon: The wave crests are refracted towards the shallower shore:

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Again the red crests are the original, incoming ones, and the green ones are the reflection:

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And then finally, let’s look at duckies again. And on waves being created by wind:

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Below you see the direction of the wind (white): One side of this little channel is shaded from the wind, so hardly any ripples there. But then on the other side, we clearly see ripples and small waves. And we see the wake the ducky made!

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And one last picture: Which direction does this little channel flow in?

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Yep. From the left to the right!

If you enjoy discovering this kind of stuff on your walks, or know someone who enjoys it, or want someone to learn to enjoy it, you might want to consider checking out my book. In my book, I show many pictures like those above, but I actually explain what is shown in the pictures rather than assuming (like I do on this blog) that my readers are oceanographers anyway… :-)

Looking at how waves are bent

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As soon as waves run into water that becomes shallow enough for the wave to “feel” it, the waves start changing how fast they propagate. And depending on the shape of the topography, this often means that the waves change direction. This is called refraction and we can see it on many many different scales.

On a large scale, we see the wind waves coming down a fjord with long, straight crests, therefore not influenced by the sea floor yet . But when those waves come close to the shore, they start feeling the sea floor and react to that by being bent towards the shallower depth:

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Below, I have drawn the wave crests I want you to focus on:

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Straight crests coming in from the left, and then bent crests running into the mouth of the little bay to the right. Seeing it put like this, this might actually also be diffraction if we think of the mouth of the bay as of the widening behind a slit that the waves came through. Oh well.

But the same thing can also be seen on smaller scale, for example in the bay shown in the picture below. You can see some of the topography through the water, and you can infer some more: Wherever sea weed breaks the surface, water around it is probably shallower than water a little further away. And when you look closely, you can again see the waves reacting to the topography.

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Similar thing again below:

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Btw, this little bay is the one you see on the right of the picture on top of this blog post!

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And it is not only physics of water that make this place super interesting: repeat after me, Ib: Anemones! :-)

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Although it is pretty cool to spot more wave processes, like for example the wind shade — no waves phenomenon.

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Again on large and small scales:

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And you see the interference of waves coming round either side of those tiny “islands”.

Or just look at the beautiful blue water, the fjord, the snowy mountains in the back…

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Or at something completely different: The salt rings that remain when rock pools fall completely dry.

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Anyway, I love it here. Thanks, Elin, for having me again!

 

Waves on Aasee in Münster. By Mirjam S. Glessmer

Wave hunt expedition. You don’t need to live close to the coast to observe all kinds of wave phenomena!

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A 1.5 hour walk around a lake — and 242 photos of said lake — later I can tell you one thing: You definitely don’t need to live close to the coast in order to observe wave phenomena!

The idea to go on a “wave hunt expedition” is actually not mine (although it definitely sounds like something I could have come up with!), it’s Robinson’s idea. Robinson had students go on wave hunt expeditions as part of their examination, and present their results in a poster. I was so impressed with that, that I had to do it myself. Obviously. So the second best thing about work travel (right after the best thing, again, obviously!) is that I find myself in a strange place with time on my hand to wander around and explore. Not that Münster might not have been a nice city to explore, but the lake…

Anyway. I only want to show you 53 out of the 242 pictures. I was going to annotate all of them so you actually see what I mean. And I started annotating. But since I am giving a workshop tomorrow (which is all prepared and ready, but I do need my beauty sleep!) I only drew the key features in the pictures, and you will have to come up with the correct keywords all by yourself (have your pick: refraction! diffraction! fetch! interference! :-)) So click through the gallery below and see first the original photo and then one that I drew in. Do you spot the same stuff that I saw, or what else do you see? Let me know!

Waves on Aasee in Münster. By Mirjam S. Glessmer

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If you think it would be useful to see all those pictures with proper annotations and descriptions at some point please let me know. I might still be excited enough to actually do it, who knows…

P.S.: I actually really enjoy work travel for the work parts, too. For example, I went to a great workshop in Dortmund earlier this year to learn about a quality framework for quantitative research, and that workshop was amazing. And a week ago, I went to Stuttgart for a meeting with all the fellows of the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft, which was also great. And now I am giving this workshop in Münster, that I am actually really excited about because I managed to condense pretty much all I know about “active learning in large groups” into a 2.5 hour workshop. Just so you don’t get the wrong idea about my priorities. Obviously water comes first, but then work is a very close second ;-)

The difference between secondary rainbows and double rainbows

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More reflection or more rain?

Ha, aren’t you enjoying talking about optics again?

Sometimes you see two rainbows that both have red on the outside and blue on the inside. And according to my post on secondary rainbows, that should not be the case. Yet is has been observed. Why?

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Rainbow and secondary rainbow, seen at Heathrow Airport. Picture by my friend F.

As you remember, secondary rainbows form outside the primary rainbows because the light is reflected twice inside the raindrop rather than only once as in the case of a primary rainbow. But that second rainbow with red on the outer rim and blue on the inner is formed differently.

Until now we’ve assumed that all the rainbows appear on the same rain front. This is not the case for the rainbow we are talking about here – it is formed on a second rain front behind the first one. So the path of light within rain drops of both rainbows on both fronts is similar, with light being only reflected once for each rainbow.

When you google double rainbows, you sometimes find pictures of two rainbows, both with red on the outer rim, nicely separated from each other. And when you see those pictures, you can be pretty sure that they’ve been photoshopped. Double rainbows of the kind we are talking about here overlap, and usually you see one full rainbow with all its colors, and then a slightly smaller rainbow with only green, blue and purple peeking out:

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If you look closely, there is a green-and-purple band on the inside of the complete rainbow. Double rainbow!

Sun dogs

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Recently spotted: sun dogs, a special form of halo! Or rather sun dog (singular), since there was only one to be seen and not a second one at equal distance from the sun but on its opposite side.

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Sun dog spotted somewhere between Mölln and Hamburg

These pictures are exactly as my camera took them without any filters or color enhancement or anything. Isn’t it weird that we appeared to be the only car stopping every couple of minutes to watch while everybody just continued driving?

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Sun dog spotted somewhere between Mölln and Hamburg

Refraction of waves

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I remember being on a looooong walk on some Danish dike when my sister was small and really didn’t want to walk any more, telling her about how phase velocity of shallow water waves depended on water depth and how you could observe that when waves are refracted towards the coast (assuming the sea floor has the right slope). And whenever I see this happening now I have to think of that freezing cold and windy day a long time ago.

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Wave fronts turning towards the shore

Watch how the angle of the wave fronts changes as they come closer to the shore:

 

Eddy generation and optics.

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Eddies. Dips in the surface and shadows on the ground.

I always get really fascinated by watching how eddies are generated by obstacles in a fluid. But it is especially exciting when you don’t only see the eddies because you see how they deform the surface, but when the water is clear enough so you can see the “shadows” on the ground!

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Of course, the dark spots you see aren’t shadows, strictly speaking. As light enters the water from the air, it is being refracted. And since the eddies’ surface imprints are dips in the surface, light is being refracted away from the perpendicular, leading to a less-well lit area – the dark spots.

But isn’t it fascinating to watch how eddies form when the water passes the stick and stones in the water when there is absolutely nothing going on upstream?