Taking over @realfaguib’s Instagram account for tank experiments and student cruise

This semester, Kjersti is teaching GEOF105 under very difficult circumstances. While much of the class happens virtually, both the mandatory lab experiments and the student cruise could (luckily!) happen. So we could also do our planned Instagram-takeover of @realfaguib‘s account!

For a week, we used Instagram’s “Story” function — pictures that can be annotated and that vanish after 24 hours (not completely, you can still see a whole week’s worth of posts here if you like) — to give little glimpses of what it is like to do experiments on rotating and non-rotating tanks, and to be on a research ship for the first time.

Instagram Stories turned out a really good tool for that, for example because we could insert gifs to illustrate concepts. Above, for example, the football above the rotating tank is spinning around its own axis, while the one above the non-rotating tank is not in motion.

And of course people like seeing pictures of cruises and colorful instrumentation!

After some initial hesitation, we were lucky enough that Ide and Stephanie took over our take-over and helped make it even more authentic & fun. Thank you!

Watching their story and seeing student cruises through students’ eyes was really interesting!

With between 700 and 1000 views for each image in the story (plus some really good questions related to what we do at sea!), we feel that we had a really successful week in terms of reaching current and prospective students with interesting stories about the issues at heart of GEOF105.

That said, the only thing left to say is a huge “thank you!” to captain and crew (who, after lunch break, swapped roles) of the research ship Hans Brattstrøm, and to @realfaguib for giving us the opportunity!

Lava lamps and toothpaste for elephants –

Not much polar oceanography in this post… but a lot of colors, physics (or is it chemistry?) and most importantly, a lot of fun! so I thought I’d share the results of me and my daughters playing in the kitchen a few evenings ago. (not much homework this week!)

Guess what will happen? (you’ll find the answer at the bottom of the post)

Milk, food coloring and a bit of soap was supposed to create a firework of colors… didn’t work out (the dye just sank when we added the soap) but it got pretty anyway!

DIY-lava lamp! Sunflower oil, food coloring, water and some aspirin make the trick!

Impressive equilibrium… much easier than it seems! We even managed to put the match on fire!

Toothpaste for elephants? Didn’t know where to get hold on H202 stronger than 3% (which I found at the pharmacy) so our toothpaste was nothing like the crazy ones we saw on youtube… but definitely the children’s favorite!

…and yes, blue plus blue makes green!

A Taylor column experiment that is kinda working

When I was visiting Elin a couple of weeks ago, I was hoping to set up an impressive Taylor column experiment. Maybe my expectations were too high of what is possible to achieve in terms of visualization and I got too convinced of my own sketch to appreciate reality?

In any case, the picture at the top of this post is as good as it got. We see that the blue dye is stopped by something located above the hockey puck (the Taylor column!), but all the turbulence in the dye curtain makes it difficult to see what is directly due to the Taylor column and what is just pretty 2-D turbulence.

But I haven’t given up on this! Here are a couple more attempts at Taylor columns in a tank under slightly different conditions. And if you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them! 🙂

Topographic Rossby waves in a tank

One experiment we wanted to run with the GEOF213 course this year were the Topographic Rossby Waves.

The idea is quite simple: We set a solid cylinder in the center of our tank and connect it with a ridge to the tank’s edge. The ridge is just a piece of hose that is taped radially to the bottom of the tank. We then spin the whole thing into solid body rotation. Once it is spun up, we add dye around the central cylinder. We then slow the tank down a tiny little bit, just enough so the water is moving relative to the tank and the ridge.

As the water now has to cross the ridge, it feels the water depth changing as it does so. A changing water depth results in changing relative vorticity to conserve potential vorticity, so the flow starts meandering.

In both the picture above and below you see just that: Upstream of the ridge, the flow is (relatively) steady. But downstream of the ridge, topographic Rossby waves start developing.

In the end, we felt like the experiment was too difficult to run to rely on it working out when presenting it in class. But that doesn’t mean that I have given up on it. I will conquer the topographic Rossby waves eventually, so stay tuned! 🙂

Internal lee waves in a tank experiment

Another tank experiment that is run in GEOF213 this fall is the one where we are moving mountains. Or at least one mountain. Read last year’s students’ account of the experiment here!

We move the mountain through stagnant water in a tank in order to simulate the flow of water over a ridge. This creates internal waves in the “lee” of the mountain.

Watch the movie below to get an impression of how cool this looks! And don’t be confused by the split screen after the time lapse ends, I was trying to give you the best of both cameras at once…

Instructions for how to set up the experiment can be found here.

Explaining Nansen’s “dead water” observation with an experiment

When I (Mirjam) was visiting Elin at GFI last year, we set up Nansen’s “dead water” experiment in the 6m long tank in GFI’s basement to be used in GEOF213 to make things a little less theory-heavy and a little more easy to grasp. And since it’s about now that the experiment will be run again in GEOF213, I wanted to take the opportunity to remind you of how cool an experiment this is!

Out considerations for using this specific experiment in teaching are described here, including the learning outcomes we hope to achieve with the experiment. Students read original literature, determine the exact setup of the experiment, compare their theory-based predictions to actual observations. How much more fun can it get? Last year’s students even wrote a blog post about the experiment, which you can find here.

“Dead water”

In 1893, Nansen described a phenomenon he observed in the Arctic: “When caught in dead water Fram appeared to be held back, as if by some mysterious force, and she did not always answer the helm. In calm weather, with a light cargo, Fram was capable of 6 to 7 knots. When in dead water she was unable to make 1.5 knots. We made loops in our course, turned sometimes right around, tried all sorts of antics to get clear of it, but to very little purpose.” (cited in Walker,  J.M.; “Farthest North, Dead Water and the Ekman Spiral,” Weather, 46:158, 1991)

The experiment we set up shows the mechanism that explains Nansen’s observation. Energy from the propulsion of the ship is used to generate internal waves at the interface between a shallow, fresh surface layer and the denser, more salty deep layer below. If the ship is moving slowly enough that the internal wave it generates has the chance to catch up with the ship, an interaction between the internal wave and ship will take place. This will slow down the ship much the same way that Nansen described.

Instructions for how to set up that experiment can be found here.

Looking at the phase velocities of shallow water and deep water waves in an experiment

Calculating the phase velocities of shallow water and deep water waves from the dispersion relation sometimes seems a bit pointless to students (at least it sure did to me (Mirjam) when I had to do it during my studies years ago). So Elin and I played around with it a bit (thanks to a suggestion by Tor Gammelsrød, who always comes to visit us in the lab!), and now there is a new experiment included in GEOF213 to complement the theoretical exercises that were already in place.

Look at Elin exciting shallow water waves in the picture below. It’s quite easy to imagine how one could measure the waves’ phase speed in the lab, just by taking the time it takes for them to run over a known distance, right? (Btw, this is the shallow water experiment that is part of the 2nd-year instruction, so students should already be familiar with shallow water waves)

Things get a little more complicated if there is more water in the tank, as you see in the picture below. Not only do waves have a smaller amplitude (because we didn’t want to risk flooding the lab), but also there is the thing about phase velocity and group velocity in deep water, that makes both of them a lot harder to observe! We don’t want any spoilers here, but you know what I am talking about…

This is such a simple experiment to run, but having the 6m long tank really helps because it gives us at least some time to observe waves before the reflections from the far end come back to haunt us.

And it is quite difficult to excite waves with more or less constant wave lengths. “Allegro!” is what Elin gave me as instructions for what kind of waves she wanted. Playing with a tank with Elin is always the best!

Sometimes you have to see it to believe it — or to wanting to be able calculate it. Planetary Rossby waves in a tank!

In the image above, we see planetary Rossby waves. They are propagating along the slope with shallow water to the right. But why? This is the kind of thing one might learn in GEOF213: “Dynamics of Ocean and Atmosphere”. This is theoretical subject, with equations filling the blackboard in most of the classes. To make it more fun, to help understanding of mechanisms and to motivate why a little theory really can’t be avoided, Elin and I (Mirjam) set up a couple of experiments over the last couple of weeks. Some working better than others, but that was to be expected…

But one that worked super well are planetary Rossby waves. We use a square tank with a sloping bottom which is spun up to solid body rotation. Then, a colored ice cube is placed in the shallow eastern corner of the tank. As it starts melting, a column of melt water forms below it. Because the melt water column is being stretched as it is sinking, it starts spinning. Once it reaches the sloping bottom, it is stretched even further. In order to conserve potential vorticity, it moves back up the slope again, starting to form a Rossby wave which then propagates westward.

Below you see an experiment both from the top (upper left corner) and the side.

What I find super cool is that the ice cube, sitting on top of its rotating Taylor column, spins in the same direction as the tank, but even faster than the tank itself! Physics says it has to, of course, but this is the kind of counterintuitive stuff that is just really nice to directly observe.

Here is another experiment, shown in real time.

Fresh water or salt water?

Today we are doing the melting ice cubes experiment in fancy glasses, because Elin is giving a fancy lecture tonight: The Nansen Memorial Lecture of the Norwegian Science Academy in Oslo! Cheers!

We each had green ice cubes in our glasses, but one of our glasses contained fresh water and the other one salt water, both at room temperature. Can you figure out who got which glass?

This time lapse might give you a clue…

To read more about this experiment, check out this blog post!

Passion for Ocean 2019

I wonder if the cashier reacted to my somewhat strange shopping list last Saturday morning: 1 kg of salt, three kilos of ice and a bottle of food coloring. Had he asked, I’d gladly have told him that I was on my way to “Passion for ocean”, a festival showing off everything that Bergen has to offer that’s related to the ocean; food, music, fishes, starfish, aquariums, organizations, activities, kayaks, boats – and off course research and science!

Nadine and I joined up with Ingunn Skelvan and students from GFI in the Bjerknes Centre tent to set up our demonstrations – it was quite a challenge in the strong wind!

 

Ingunn showed to anyone interested how blowing (CO2) into seawater lowers the pH (which causes the pH-indicator in the water to change color). When the pH in the ocean decreases it is more difficult for organisms in the water to build their shells.

What balloon will explode first when hold over an open flame? The one filled with water or the one filled with air?

Since the heat capacity of water is much higher than that of air, the water balloon will not get nearly as warm as the air balloon (and hence not explode). That’s also why the water in the lake doesn’t heat up as quickly as the air when the sun is out – and why the majority of the heat that the earth is accumulating due to our emissions of CO2 is stored in the ocean.

 

Nadine had a more difficult question for the visitors: If you put an ice cube in a glass of sea water and one in a glass of sea water – which one will melt first? Do you know? You can try at home – or visit  Mirjam’s blog to find  out!