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Title text:
They're up there with coral islands, lightning, and caterpillars turning into butterflies.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3135/
Everyone was taught the tides look like two giant water bulges going around the earth in line with the moon.
That representation is oversimplified and false.
This is how the tides look like at a global level. It’s messed up.
Ok, that clarifies things so much better for me. Thank you.
You understand it more after that?
I'm more confused, honestly. But that's hardly surprising.
The pictures they used to teach us the tides as children came to make less sense to me in regards to certain places having higher tides than others. I couldn't picture how. That animation clarified how tides are ordered by the Moon and made chaotic by the shapes of land. The planetary ocean bulges they taught us as kids stuck with me too long and prevented deeper understanding. It finally clicked for me.
Fair enough.
I just have a hard time translating what what shown in the video to what's actually happening. Might be a bit too much to take in at once.
Then again, I haven't cared much about the tides ever, and I only know that the tides are a function of the moon because of Bill Nye, I think.
My HS "education" was pretty bad, honestly.
Look at one spot and see how it repeats. Like the tides between South America and Africa kind of rotates through the Atlantic.
Tides in the Bay of Fundy, Canada are 16 metres (50 feet).
See, that's the part that confuses the hell outta me. How can water be higher in one spot than others just due to the Moon's gravity? Yeah it's the geography of the area, got it. But still, how?
Ever seen a ferrofluid, which follows the shape of magnetic fields? Same thing, but with gravity.
Of course, that only accounts for a fraction of those 16 meters... but there's a lot of ocean water. Get it moving (because the Moon and the Sun move, and the Earth rotates under them, and there's a whole lot of ocean currents on top of that, due to differences in water temperatures and salinity, and coriolis forces, and winds, and whatnot) and it builds up a lot of inertia.
Push it into geography that keeps narrowing and narrowing like a funnel, and the only place it can go is in, and up.
Water gets in there, wants to get out, but there's a whole damn ocean pushing it in, so it has no option but to keep accumulating into the funnel.
Also, having the geography look a bit like a Tesla valve that'll easily let water in but not so easily let it out probably doesn't help either; place's bound to get close to overflowing, before it can empty itself out.
I think lightning would be crazy to anyone who never experienced a planet with it. Like, "WTF, sometimes your sky does what?"
In the Bay of Fundy, Canada we have the highest tides in the world (53 feet high). It's enough to make some of the tributary rivers flow backward with the rising tide. I've seen it my whole life but it still amazes me to see a harbour completely empty of water with boats sitting on the bottom waiting for the tide to come back in.
I live in an area with sea but almost no tide (although wind direction can have a pretty big effect on water level) and I have always felt that tides are weird man.
Yeah I grew up inland and tides are weird
woah XKCD is still making comics?
There are places in the solar system where the tide rips new mountains up every go around.
That’s metal AF
... some metal band (Dethklok?) recording their song/filming their vid/having the concert on such a moon - the guitar solo intensifies as the band is lifted upwards by a soaring mountain, epicly, with lava flows.
I think it's funny that Dethklok is both a parody metal band and one of the best metal bands around. I don't even really like metal and I love Dethklok.
Io.
True!
Going further - "tides" actually rip planets & stars fully apart (binary star systems, around black holes, yo mamma casually strolling through a galaxy).
Gasp! I'm telling my mamma you said that about her!!
(because it's gonna make her giggle like an idiot, too, like it did to me!)
giggle
Oh nyooo, quickly, someone alert LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory)!!!
I remember never believing my parents when they explained it to me as a kid. Clouds being caused by cigarette smoke was reasonable but the moon pulling out the ocean seemed too outrageous.
Does the moon decrease the air pressure enough for that to matter?
As a child, my friend was told by her mother that wind occurs because people group up and blow really hard.
Been trying to learn about the tides around here so I can tell what I'm seeing on the water. Imagine my joy when I found a Casio, which I collect, with tide and moon phase indicators!
And that's when I learned the Gulf Coast is strange, has diurnal tides (twice a day) the watch can't predict. Took me an hour and a half to figure out it would never function. The moon phase works!
Huh. TIL that there are three common types of tidal cycles and which one you get depends on geography, location, ocean currents. https://beltoforion.de/en/tides/tidal_cycles.php
And yeah, dinural is apparently the most rare of the three. Wild.
FlatEarthersSayWhat
They'll just say the moon pulls the water around as it circles above the flat disc or something idk