Angelica Gilroy helped organize the Giddings’ group and some other Scripps students to attend San Diego’s Expanding Your Horizon conference. Expanding Your Horizons is an annual conference aimed to interest girls, aged 11 to 16, in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in fun, informative, hands-on workshops. The goals include helping the girls learn about STEM based careers, providing them with positive role models, and showing the excitement and fun of science. Our group presented a series of hands-on activities demonstrating the effects of density in mini water tanks. This included having the girls explore gravity currents, intrusions, stratification, internal waves, melting ice, and much more. We related the dynamics they were seeing to oceanic processes that we all study. Everyone had a great time, the scientists and the students… in fact we had a hard time prying the girls (and sometimes ourselves!) away from the tanks!

Above is the group of scientists leading our workshop. From left to right: Julia Fiedler, Angelica Gilroy, Olavo Marques, Isabella Arzeno, and Sarah Giddings.

Left: an intrusion layer of intermediate density (blue) between a dense (red) and fresh (clear) layer about to hit the wall of the mini-tank.