water – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

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

mglessmer — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 09:52:34 +0000

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 […]

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

mglessmer — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 09:32:33 +0000

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 […]

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Erosion

mglessmer — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 11:35:37 +0000

Erosion happens not only to sandy paths or beaches on the large scale, but also on a small scale to really sturdy structures like the groynes in Hastings, where each of the massive pillars has its own little dip around it, being bitten into the concrete little by little by the force of the waves, […]

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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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One glance — do you know which of the bottles is empty?

mglessmer — Tue, 28 Jun 2016 08:15:40 +0000

The other day I was sitting in my conservatory with a friend when I had to take the photo below: Can you see how one bottle refracts light and the other one does not? What does this tell us about whether there is water in either of those bottles? I met most “normal” people wouldn’t even […]

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One of the most exciting things about work travel?

mglessmer — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 11:14:51 +0000

One of the most exciting things about work travel? Staying in tons of different hotels, which all have different opportunities to play with water. For example at a recent team event, there was this tap with a really efficient aerator, that made the hydraulic jump look even more exciting than usual: And then at a […]

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