I’m researching how tides work as part of a book I’m writing, and I came across the term “Amphidromic Points” a couple of times. I did read through the Wikipedia page on them ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphidromic\_point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphidromic_point)) but there’s a lot of math involved that I didn’t quite understand.
Was curious if anyone here might be able to better explain it in layman’s terms?
In: Planetary Science
So, I’m just going off of the wikipedia article and my understanding of math and physics (associate’s degree in math, general-ed college physics). That said, I’ve never encountered this particular idea before, so I can’t provide anything deeper than what follows:
If you take a container of water, and shake it so that waves form; you will notice that some places in the container have big waves, and some don’t. If you get a different container of water, there will be different points. You will especially notice this if instead of shaking randomly, you shake the bottle in a circular motion: there will tend to be a point around which the water rotates; and that point will tend to have very small change in height from your shaking.
The oceans are a really big container of water; and the sun and moon shake that container through gravity. The result are the tides. However, the oceans are also shaken some by the Coriolis Effect – the fact that the earth is a rotating sphere, and so the equator is rotating around the center faster than the poles. However, all of these forces tend to be circular; so the result is the same as when you shake your container in a circle: the tides circle around some points.
Those points are called “amphidromic points” (“around-flowing points”), because the tides flow around those points.
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