Tides: A Very Short Introduction

Description

The tide is important to Earth's climate, the biological productivity of our seas, and our hunt for renewable energy sources. It is also thought to have played a role in the evolution of life on Earth. This book explains the nature and cause of the tide, its observation and prediction, unusual tides, and their relevance to us.

• Explains the nature and cause of the tide, its observation and prediction, unusual tides, and their relevance to us
• Blends clear explanations of well known tidal phenomena with recent insights in the deep ocean and coastal seas
• Considers the effects of tidal processes on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and the possibility of tidally-heated liquid oceans with their own ecosystems
• Discusses how we can study the role of the tide in the geological and biological evolution of our own planet with innovative computer models
• Part of the Very Short Introductions series - over ten million copies sold worldwide

About the Author(s)

David George Bowers, Emeritus Professor of Physical Oceanography, Bangor University, and Emyr Martyn Roberts, Researcher, University of Bergen

David George Bowers is Emeritus Professor of Physical Oceanography at Bangor University. He has taught courses on tides and tidal phenomena for many years. As well as Bangor, he has worked as a Research Fellow at Flinders University of South Australia and has collaborated (and published work) with scientists across the world, including in France, Malaysia, Mozambique and the USA. He has taken part in research cruises in the Indian, Atlantic, and Southern Oceans as well as many voyages in the coastal waters of north-west Europe. David co-authored a popular textbook on oceanography together with David Thomas, Introducing Oceanography (Dunedin Academic Press, 2012).

Emyr Martyn Roberts is a researcher at the Department of Biological Sciences and the K.G. Jebsen Centre for Deep Sea Research at the University of Bergen. He has a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography and his research is centred on how physical phenomena in the sea influence the distribution of flora and fauna at the seabed. He has written peer-reviewed scientific articles about tides and has participated in research cruises in the Pacific, Arctic, and Indian Oceans, and in numerous coastal seas of the North East Atlantic. He currently works on a large, EU-funded project studying deep-sea sponges.

Table of Contents

1:Watching the tide
2:Making tides
3:Measurement and prediciton
4:The tide in shelf seas
5:Tidal bores
6:Tides and the Earth
7:Tidal mixing
8:New frontiers
Further Reading
index

Reviews

"This is an interesting and well written book that provides an invaluable introduction to all things tidal ... This is most certainly a book I would recommend to any oceanography students, or indeed physical geography students keen to get an understanding of tides and their importance in marine, coastal and estuarine environments." - Robert A. Francis, Progress in Physical Geography