Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

As the earth rotates, the sea reaches towards the moon, causing a high tide at the closest point. A simultaneous high tide rises at the opposite point on the globe, too, the farthest point from the moon. This one is a little more counterintuitive: here, the moon does not exert enough gravity to pull the water inwards, and so the tide bulges in the other direction, freed from all constraints. High tides happen when the moon is close, and when she is far away, and low tides occur in the spaces between. The sun is just a helper, amplifying the moon, but it does have a very real influence on our perception of the tides. A day as we know it is twenty-four hours long, but the moon orbits the earth in twenty-four hours and fifty minutes. This means that from where we’re standing, the tides shift by roughly an hour each day, moving restlessly through the mornings and afternoons, as if they are trying to escape us.