Why does the Moon affect the ocean daily causing tides but not other things like plants, winds, clouds etc.?
In: Physics
Okay. Let’s say you’re making a pizza. You have the ball of dough and you gently pull the whole ball toward yourself. It’s still going to be pretty much the same shape, right?
Now imagine instead of pulling the whole ball, you just grab one part of it and pull it towards you. This will stretch out the dough.
That’s what causes the tides. Tides are not due *just* to the force of gravity from the moon. They’re due to the fact that the force of gravity is weaker on the far side of the Earth and stronger on the close side of the Earth. The moon is effectively stretching out the Earth like pulling on a pizza dough.
This is because gravity is stronger when you’re close and weaker when you’re far away. Now if you take a plant, which is approximately 250,000 miles away from the moon, the difference in this force of gravity between the close and far side of the plant is so miniscule it might as well be zero. But the Earth is thousands of miles wide… so there is a noticeably different force of gravity, which causes the moon to “stretch” the Earth out. And since water has no defined shape, we see this stretching mainly in the ocean’s tides.
The moon does affect everything. The force it applies is very small. There are about 1350000000000000000 tons of ocean. Gravity pulls about the same amount on each and every one of those tons. Tides are huge, but the force acting on any individual ton of water is very small. The force acting on, say, you, is smaller still – unless you weigh a ton.
A plant is but a speck of sand compared to the ocean.
Only 25% of Earth is land. Of that land, maybe half is fertile. Of that half, the majority of growing flora is barely a foot high. The remainder are trees about 50-200 foot night.
Meanwhile, the ocean goes tens of thousands of feet deep in many places, covers 75% of the surface area, and weighs a billion times more than all the plants and trees combined.
And water is fluid.
Amazing explanation- do we have a same one for our flat earth friends? Just curious.
It does effect humans. Ever see how crazy some get just by a full one?
There are lunar tides in the atmosphere. They are just very small and far less noticble than heating effects from the sun.
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-the-moon-have-a-tida/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-the-moon-have-a-tida/)
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