Back in December, I did a takeover of the Instagram account of WissKommSquad, a community of german science communicators. I translated it over new years, but somehow never published it. I have since taken tons of much better pictures of snowflakes, but the story I’m telling here is still interesting, I think: How snow and […]
One of the instruments that was used on our recent student cruise was the so-called MSS (“MicroStructure Sonde”, sometimes also called VMP, “Vertical Microstructure Profiler”) — an instrument that is used to measure how much mixing is going on in the ocean. Those measurements can help us figure out e.g. renewal rates of bottom water […]
While student cruises usually have a lot of desired learning outcomes related to being able to use oceanographic instrumentation and knowledge of regional oceanography, ultimately one of their purposes is to equip students to function well as sea-going oceanographers, should they choose to take that direction. So in my opinion, it is very important that […]
Very early knowledge about oceanography stems from beach finds that had to have been transported to that beach from far away because the finds themselves (pieces of trees, or coconuts, or whatever) were not native to their finding places so the ocean must have provided a connection between their place of origin and the beach […]
Have you ever seen a speedboat drive past, looked at its wake moving torwards you, then gotten distracted, and when you look back a little while later been surprised that the wake hasn’t moved as far towards you as you thought it would have during the time you looked away? Well, I definitely have had […]
For Lars Henrik and Harald‘s GEOF105 class we are deploying home-made surface drifters on the student cruise. Today I had the opportunity to join the cruise again, and since the weather today made for beautiful pictures, I just have to share them here. First, at the end of every rainbow, as we all know, you’ll find … home-made […]
A big part of any oceanographic research cruise: Taking water samples. Here is a group of students practicing how to arm Niskin bottles that will go into the ocean open on both ends, and that will then, when the whole rosette is on its way up again, be closed one after another at depths that […]
A bicycle safety flag, a plastic bucket, four paint roller trays — what are those people doing there?! Until now this might almost count as kitchen oceanography! Home-made surface drifters But it’s only almost kitchen oceanography; at least my kitchen isn’t usually stocked with GPS trackers, which is what is mounted on this contraption. Let alone the […]
Wanna know why I am drawing a research ship “Wimmelbild”*? Check out the blog post over at our #SciCommChall blog to find out why! And while you are there, why not join us in our #SciCommChall? :-) *In case you are wondering what the translation English of “Wimmelbild” might be: No idea how to properly translate […]
Sometimes waves are very regular and mostly of the same length. Those are the ones that I usually talk about when I talk about interference of waves. But of course, other times, there are different kinds of waves with different histories and different lengths, and those do interfere, too. For example in the picture below, […]
Remember how we talked about how waves seem to propagate extremely slowly into that calm patch that occurs when a boat pulls away from a dock? Well, the other day I noticed that there is even more physics you can see when watching a similar situation: You see how long waves propagate much faster than […]
So in my previous post we deployed a mooring (in fact, those pictures were from the deployment of several different moorings). Now how do we get such a monster back on board again? Recovering a mooring is always slightly nerve-wracking, because even though we’ve tried very hard to forget about this possibility during the year […]
Do you want to know the full story behind the rope in the mystery picture the other day? On the recent Håkon Mosby cruise, we did a lot of mooring work, and that rope was part of a mooring that we recovered after it has been out in the Iceland Sea for two years. So […]
Back by popular demand: Reading the water in my mystery pictures series! Who knows what’s going on in the picture below? You might recognize a couple of details that might give you a hint: There are waves parallel to the rope and drops of water falling from the rope. And here is what happened: A […]
So now we have prepared our sea water sample and are ready to start titrating to figure out the concentration of dissolved oxygen. The sample itself changes color with added thiosulfate, it goes from yellow to lighter yellow to clear over a wide range of added thiosulfate. But determining the titration volume just based on […]
So how do we actually measure dissolved oxygen concentrations from the samples we took in the last post? We are using a method called “titration” to determine the unknown concentration of dissolved oxygen in our sea water sample. And this is how titration works in general: During titration, we add known volumes of a chemical, […]
Since my task on the recent Håkon Mosby cruise was to measure dissolved oxygen, I will give an overview over how that is done over the next couple of posts. Starting with today’s post on how to sample (because this isn’t as simple as just filling a bottle with sea water!) In fact, sampling oxygen […]
So you might have noticed that the last 6 weeks or so all posts had been scheduled ahead and that I was strangely absent. Yep. That’s because I was on a research cruise in the Nordic Seas. But be assured – we’ll be talking about that for the next couple of posts! First, let’s get […]
I recently went on a trip to Heligoland, Germany’s only island that is far away from the mainland (70 km in this case). It was a great trip, and I know you’ll be reading about it for some weeks to come :-) Today, we’ll just do the touristy parts, though, and get into the oceanography […]
My friend Elin is currently on a research cruise in Antarctica and you really need to check out her blog. She is writing about life at sea, including the most beautiful photos of sea ice. Today’s post is called “ice or no ice” and describes the first couple of days of the research cruise. Elin combines […]
I’ve been thinking about an old friends recently. I met Anton on a RV Knorr-cruise I was on in 2011, and we spent many fun night watches running CTDs. Together with Sindre, this was our favorite toy: The echo sounder. Many CTD packages have an altimeter on them so they don’t accidentally hit the bottom, and […]
