sea ice – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Currently reading MacInnes et al. (2026) on “Who do we trust on climate change, and why?”

mglessmer — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:08:20 +0000

What we believe about climate change often does not depend on what we know about climate change, but on what people around us believe. This makes it really difficult for climate scientists to make their warnings heard and acted upon by people outside their own bubble. In their article “Who do we trust on climate […]

Source

It is not up to us to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it

mglessmer — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 12:07:09 +0000

I now finished reading Venet (2024)’s “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice in School” (where I understood that “the process is the point“, and where then helpful tools like “Vent diagrams” were introduced). Now, reading the third part of the book felt so empowering. The Talmud quote that I modified for this post’s title, […]

Source

Insta takeover on snowflake formation

mglessmer — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 21:54:10 +0000

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 […]

Source

My kids’ article on the formation of sea ice is out!

mglessmer — Sat, 15 Jun 2019 13:05:43 +0000

I recently published an article about how sea ice forms which, I think, turned out pretty well. But the coolest thing is the illustration that Jessie Miller did to go along with the article: Seeing this illustration (and, of course, having the article published) was a super nice surprise during the busy run-up to my big event, […]

Source

Update on freezing ice cubes and the temperature distribution in our freezer

mglessmer — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 12:31:01 +0000

After writing the blog post on sea ice formation, brine release and what ice cubes can tell you about your freezer earlier today, I prepared some more ice cubes (because you can never have too many ice cubes for kitchen oceanography!), and then happened to look into the freezer a couple of hours later. And this […]

Source

Sea ice formation, brine release, or: What ice cubes can tell you about your freezer

mglessmer — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 08:32:48 +0000

Many of my kitchen oceanography experiments use dyed ice cubes, usually because it makes it easier to track the melt water (for example when looking at how quickly ice cubes melt in freshwater vs salt water, or for forcing overturning circulations). But the dyed ice cubes tell interesting stories all by themselves, too! Salt water […]

Source

Guest post: Arctic sea ice thinning.

mglessmer — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 04:44:11 +0000

Exciting guest post on a newly published paper by Angelika H. H. Renner. I’ve met Angelika on a cruise in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current a long time ago where we worked on an instrument together and created an advent calendar to keep up everybody’s morale during the second month of the cruise before flying home on christmas eve, […]

Source

Why melting sea ice does not contribute to sea level rise.

mglessmer — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 03:50:52 +0000

Simple experiment on why the impact of glaciers and sea ice on sea level, respectively, are not the same. It could be so simple: An ice cube sinks into water until the mass it replaces is equal to its own mass. Since the mass of said ice cube is not changing when it melts, under […]

Source