Coastal Resilience Talks
16 December 2025, 14:00 CET
To join the webinar, register here

The Coastal Resilience Talks, a joint initiative by DCC-CR, CMCC, and Deltares, continues.

In this talk, participants will explore the fundamental physical properties of seawater and the resulting density structure in the ocean through a simple yet powerful ice-melt experiment. By placing ice cubes in freshwater and seawater containers, the experiment reveals why ice melts differently in the two environments. The session will use temperature-salinity diagrams and a real-dye demonstration to visualize and explain the underlying oceanographic processes.

This session introduces a hands-on and interactive experiment designed to explore fundamental physical properties of seawater. Using a simple yet revealing ice-melt demonstration, participants will uncover how temperature, salinity, and density shape ocean structure — an approach that offers an accessible and engaging way to communicate key ocean concepts to learners of all ages.

Speaker: Sung Yong Kim, Associate Professor, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Republic of Korea

About the Speaker

Sung Yong Kim is an Associate Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at KAIST (Daejeon, Republic of Korea). He earned a B.S. in Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering from Seoul National University (1999), and a Ph.D. in Oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego (2009). His research focuses on coastal circulation, sub-mesoscale processes, statistical and dynamical data analysis, environmental parameterizations, and operational coastal ocean observing systems.