I worked on blimps many years ago. I remember being amazed it would take most of an hour to deflate one even with a hole big enough for me to walk through.
That one also makes all the cool 'being sucked out a tiny hole into spaaaaaaaace' crises in science fiction way less exciting in real life too. What is a dramatic moment on a tv show is maintenance on the ISS.
@@Dandelion_Stitches because there you go through an airlock, and don't open the hatch at 1 bar pressure (more like 0.01 bar residual afaik). If you *were* to open the hatch like in the movies, you'd absolutely get pretty violent explosive decompression Think of cabin failures of aircraft at altitude (people have been sucked out!), but even worse
You have a few things backwards here... The strait being 8 miles wide isn't the important thing. The important thing is that it is about 40 miles long. There may be a difference in water level between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean of a few metres due to the tides, but that's spread over 40 miles. It's an incline of less than 0.005°. Completely negligible. There is no sudden change in water level like water going over a dam. The lack of strong tides in the Mediterranean isn't because the straight is wide, but because it is narrow. There just isn't room to get enough water in and out. The surface area of the Mediterranean is 2.5 million square kilometres. That means to raise the level by a metre you need 2.5 trillion cubic metres of water. A difference in water height of a few metres isn't going to create a flow anywhere near enough to move that much water in a few hours though an 8 mile wide gap.
Correct! Imagine a slow-flowing, well-navigable river like the Mississippi. Its average gradient is 0.01 %. The tidal range of the Atlantic before the Gibraltar Straight is not some crazy 20 ft or so... that only happens because of some weird shore geographies... no, that tidal range is only about 3 feet or 1 meter. The tidal range in the Western Mediterranean is about 1 foot , and it is not simultaneous to the Atlantic tide! The maximum difference level of the 2 bodies of water can therefore not be more than 4 ft, spread over about a 40-mile long chanel. The gradient is therefore
On evaporation: When I lived in Ireland, a sopping wet pair of jeans would take multiple days to fully dry if hung up (indoors, not in a heated cupboard. Outdoors not possible most the time due to rain). I live in Spain now. A sopping wet pair of jeans left in direct sunlight will be bone dry in less than half an hour
If you're regularly drying jeans (or any other dyed clothing) in direct sunlight, make sure you have them turned inside out, otherwise they will fade. [Edit: They will fade anyway, but direct UV sunlight will greatly speed up that process.] (Laundry advice from Queensland, Australia)
It's the same in the Baltic sea, air pressure and sometimes wind pushing the water to one side or end of the sea can change water heights by up to ±1 metre in places. The tidal effect is theoretically there, but it's only about 1 cm iirc, completely unnoticeable compared to the other factors. And for a similar reason, the Danish straits are too narrow and shallow.
"The Mediterranean Sea is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to Mediterranean Sea." Apologies to Douglas Adams but sometimes I get that same vibe, in a good way, from these Lindybeige chats!
The budget this guy got for writing a graphic novel was also unbelievably big, and he took the money to go on fun trips and make videos for more money, meanwhile, the people who invested got nothing. What a top notch guy this lindybeige is right?
No, it's because Lindy "stole" a lot of money from his fanbase by promising a graphic novel, not delivering, and buying the moroccans off to thicken the water.
The third possibility is if the ceasing is slow, we may glimpse it. Such as, the temperature of the earth's core, which is always going down, or the sun's stellar evolution, which is a one way street. Also, it really depends what you count as a single state, I suppose. The temperature of different parts of the earth is constantly out of balance because of its spin and the sun, which creates incredibly intricate fractals of weather and whatnot. Is it more correct to view the clouds as chaos, whose positions are fundamentally impossible to predict in the long term, or the broad patterns in that weather as a climatic "point of balance"? I don't think its reasonable to call one perspective more correct than the other.
Sorry, not true. Many permanent systems are dynamic and do not tend to equilibrium. The economy is one (despite what neoclassical economists may fantasize). Predator-prey population dynamics is another. Happy to concede that many other systems do tend to equilibrium though.
@@briskyoungploughboy Predator prey systems and the economy are both definitely NOT permanent lolll, the Mediterranean is a millions-year-old continentally big geological feature; humanity existed as barely upright Australopithecus 5 million years ago. Its not the same as seas or mountains and valleys
A simpler explanation: The distance between Gibraltar and Italy is ~2000km. If the difference in tides is about 10m, that is a gradient of 1-in-200 000. A few google searches puts the tides in Portugal and Gibraltar as 4m and 1m respectively, at a distance of 300km. That's still only a 1-in-100 000 gradient.
There’s also the point that the gravitational potentials that cause tides vary east to west. In other words, the height of the head of water that one would think should be rushing through the strait isn’t as broad east to west as one might think. Rather than “the whole of the Atlantic Ocean”, it’s only a couple hundred miles of water that has that hump to it, pushing against the whole of the Mediterranean.
Ok so for the dummies here (like myself), could you please explain what geographic conditions WOULD create a gigantic tidal tsunami? E.g. would Italy have to be closer to the strait?
@@jonnies i'm fairly certain nothing would create a tidal tsunami because tide is caused by a gradual gravity difference and a tsunami by impact. unless the moon suddenly appears out of nowhere that just shouldn't happen. a huge tidal flood would happen if there is a fragile balance point. think of a shallow ridge between water and emptiness. it's high enough and stable enough to keep the water off even through high tide but the open side is constantly eroded by wind and rain. at some point it becomes too narrow and the pressure of a high tide breaks the fragile top, eroding lower - the flooding of the mediterranean sea. considering man-made structures instead of purely geographical stuff this can happen with a dam in the netherlands when the water level rises.
The history of the Mediterranean is telling. Over the last 50 million years, as Africa has moved north, the strait of Gibraltar has closed, only to open again due to erosion. When the strait closes, the Mediterranean dries up, leaving an extremely hot and barren salt desert. It's so hot due to the low altitude; as air moves down it gets denser and heats up. The rivers flowing into the Mediterranean alone would not keep it full, but would form much smaller, evaporating lakes in places. When erosion would open the strait, a massive tsunami would flood the basin. In general, systems tend towards equilibrium. A daily tsunami would cause massive changes to the landscape until it ceases. I imagine that one process would be widening the strait enough to reach a steadier state. If you want more detail, the book "otherlands" by Thomas Halliday is where I read about this the cyclic history of the Mediterranean.
And clearly the arrogance of Lindy is holding back any semblence of progress of the graphic novel he promised 8 years ago. Nice to see he took the money of his fans to make something he never finished and seems not to intend to finish
I’m a Pacific Ocean enjoyer and my city is 80 miles inland from the ocean and we still receive a noticeable tidal change in our river (Sacramento river)
I live 362 km (225 mi) upriver and currently we get on average about 3.5 m (11.5 ft) at the weir. But that varies between 2.09m (6.8 ft) and 5.52 m (18.1 ft)
I was thinking about the tidal currents going through the Golden Gate during this whole video. Unprepared at the wrong time of day can end badly. Grew up near the shores of San Pablo Bay (NW Contra Costa) and used to explore the mud flats during low tide. Also used to camp/fish in the delta as a kid and was always intrigued by how much the tides affected the waters there. (Also some gnarly currents.)
Same here in Stockton, it's crazy how much the tides affect the water levels in the sloughs and smaller rivers. Makes me think of the tsunami that came from Japan all the up the rivers, bashing boats and docks together. Never expected that!
You do love an obscure unit of measurement LB! We had miles, fathoms, "rifle round reach", "panamaxes", feet, "beams"....all just to describe the size of the straight of Gibraltar! Colour me impressed. FYI, 8 miles is also about 104,000 sandwiches.
In Atlantic Canada there's a place called reversing falls. 50 foot tide has a pushing match against watershed rivers. There is a phenomena called Tidal Bore where a wave travels upriver. Some can surf this wave.
You are mixing stories. The Reversing Falls on the Saint John River are at a ridge. At low tide the river falls into the ocean. At high tide water rushes inland, more like a rapids. This configuration does not cause a bore. Some other rivers have them though. Fun fact, the Saint John River is tidal 150km from the ocean.
The River Severn in SW England also has a bore, it's not just a Canadian thing: tho in fairness the Severn cannot compete with the reversing falls for dramatic effect
I will never cease to be entertained by how Lloyd manages to embody a character of both a crazed conspiracy theorist and the cool uncle who produces wonders of fancy from the tools in his shed, at the same time. A wonderful historian indeed.
The flow rate through the street of Gibraltar is cross section x velocity. The cross section is fairly small and the velocity is limited by friction with the sea floor and turbulence due to the other currents Lindy mentioned. Turns out this flow rate is not sufficient to raise and lower the water level in the Med much.
I've been through there on a submarine submerged over a dozen times in my career and it's always hairy. The underwater river of fresher water and differences in salinity make depth keeping quite an endeavor 😂(STS1 SS)RET USS SAN JUAN SSN-751 /USS TOLEDO SSN- 769
I read many many years ago that Donitz resisted sending U-boats into the Med during WW II because it was a one way ticket. They could enter submerged, catching a good tail wind (tail current?) and zip through fast enough to avoid the British and not suffocate. But they were too slow to fight that submerged head current coming back out, and if they tried it on the surface, they'd be moving ducks for the British.
@@68404 I said "resisted", not prevented. Donitz knew that every single Med U-boat was trapped there and could never rejoin the Battle of the Atlantic, which was more important, since every target in the Med had been a target in the Atlantic.
An interesting geological fact is the increasing salinity from evaporation could eventually lead to the entire Mediterranean filling up with thousands of feet of salt as the concentration gets high enough to force the excess to crystallize and fall out of solution. The same process is responsible for filling much of the Gulf of Mexico with salt, as the area used to be a deep tropical sea with no outlet connected to the broader ocean. The high salinity at depth limited the organisms that could survive there, so organic materials sinking from the surface (dead plankton, algea, fish, crustaceans, etc.) wouldn't decompose before getting trapped in the accumulating layers of salt. Over time more sediment was deposited on top from inland erosion being washed out to sea. The trapped organisms eventually turned into oil and gas from the pressure, and the erosion sediment concreted into impermeable sedimentary rock layers that trapped the oil and gas under the sea floor, which is what companies like BP drill for today.
Med water is incredibly salty. I worked on the Canal du Rhone à Sète, mostly fed by sea water, years ago and we had a boat, 6 weeks old, which nearly sank because of electrolysis between bronze and steel fittings. The galvanised steel stern tube corroded through and 3/4inch steel bolt heads disappeared because the salt water acts like acid. The stern tube was fibre-glassed to the hull as a quick repair. The heads of new steel bolts fitted as an emergency measure disappeared in 2 weeks. The bolts and stern tube were replaced with brass and gave no further problem.
@@sjaaktrekhaak253 They were built by a company situated on a river, so they never bothered to fit anodes to any boats they built. By the way, they are called anodes, not diodes.
@@williamgeorgefraser I stand corrected. Actually, standing of course is meant figuratively as I cannot really describe my litteral position right now. It's probably best destribed as something between sitting, laying and hanging as I'm constantly shfiting and moving around on my couch desparately trying to fight the urge to vomit and make it though the day. Oh well, at least I get to pathetically blame my above mentioned mistake on being sick with some stomac bug. Anyway, hope you're having a great day!
I love these videos. You are like Socrates just talking at length in depth and in an engaging manner whatever subject may be crossing your mind. Love these!
There's a video by Adam Ragusea about salting pasta water, and I believe he found that normal salted water for cooking is only about 10% as salty as average sea water. Cooking with Mediterranean water would be intense
@@coryman125 Oh, wow, I didn't think it was that big of a difference! Cooking with water from the Dead Sea would be really bad, then. I should watch that video. I'm already subscribed to his channel.
I suspect it refers to natural reaction that you have when tasting sea water, you tend to spit it out.. like add as little salt as possible but not so little that you can just drink it like regular water, it should be just enough to be unpleasant
Around 5 million years ago, the Mediterranean evaporated almost completely. Essentially leaving a salt desert larger than a typical country kilometers below sea level and a few very inhospitable large salt lakes. The weather was likely extremely hot in that basin and had humans existed at the time they would have found it very difficult to live there.
Technicality: the Atlantic doesn't go up and down. The water moves around a little, humping up in an area that travels around it. High tide at La Rochelle 5:10 PM, which is 16:10 UTC. High tide at Lisbon 3:29 PM, which is 15:29 UTC. High tide at St. John's, Newfoundland, 8:10 PM, which is 23:59 UTC because Newfoundland is in one of those half-hour time zones. High tide in Baltimore on the Chesapeake Bay 6:49 PM, which is 23:49 UTC. High tide at Bull Street, Savannah, Georgia, USA 8:41 PM, which is 01:41 UTC and actually tomorrow morning from La Rochelle's point of view. It gets even weirder in the Strait of Dover, what with the tides coming in and going out via the west end of the Channel and via the North Sea at different times.
Technically all the tides in the world are caused by the moon dragging the surface of the water into a hump which travels around the world lagging slightly behind it. Also slightly confused by the 5° additional obliquity in the orbit of the Moon to the existing 23.44° equatorial obliquity of the Earth's inclination in its orbit around the Sun.
Thank you for posting this sequence. I knew the tide shifted like this, but didn't have a good mental picture. Also, greetings as a friend from Beau/Belle's channels. Always fun to see familiar faces, so-to-speak.✌️😎🍀
The Baltic has little evaporation and so is much less salty than the Atlantic. When I moved to Sweden I was surprized to see how much (1.5 meters at times) the water level in the Baltic goes up and down. It has nothing to do with the tides or the runoff it is because it is fairly shallow and the wind pushes the water around.
@@williamgarner6779 The baltic sea is so salty you can actually drink it and get hydrated. Its salinity ranges from 0,3% to 0,9% which is less than the salinity of human blood at 0,9%. Dont drink it tho the baltic is very poluted, but in event of emergency when youre stuck on a boat with no water Baltic sea water is drinkable.
An example of how that initially expected interaction in the Gibraltar strait would look would be "slufters". Tidal salt marches that form behind a small, but permanent, breach in the coastal dunes. it creates a landscape of shallow puddles connected by a few streams that get completely flooded every flood and can almost entirely dry up every ebb. It creates an incredibly dynamic ecosystem because it, on a scale, suffers from massive floods twice a day
You can't taste the difference in salinity (they're both painfully salty) but you can slightly feel the difference in buoyancy when you swim in the Atlantic compared to swimming in the Mediterranean. At leat if you're like me, pretty long and skinny, I've only recently gained enough belly fat to be able to somewhat float in fresh water. But when I was younger and skinnier; I could not float at all in fresh water without constantly threading water. If I took a deep breath and just went limp, with full lungs I would bob around with only the very top of my back occasionally touching the surface and then dip below again. In the North sea here in Norway I would still not float enough to be useful but my back would stay at the surface. In the Mediterranean I could with some effort float high enough to breathe (as long as I didn't empty my lungs too much) without constantly swimming.
@@Salamander96 Well I live next to Strangford lough (the wee sea between the Ards penisula & the South down area in northern Ireland) & I can tell ye that the tides have no effect on the ferry between the towns of Portaferry & Strangford bar the rare time where their is extreme flooding like after the massive storms that flooded Downpatrick last year other than that no tides have effects.
Love your channel Lindy. Love that you find yourself scratching your head about something, discover the answer is very interesting, and the run to tell all your friends about the interesting thing you just learned. I do that with friends and family. They get a ton of random, unsolicited "wow did you guys know..." text messages from me.
Having sailed the Straits probably 300 times. If you get your departure time wrong on Springs, you sometimes feel like there is a huge tidal tsunami. It's easy to miss the bar in Ceuta if you bugger it up.
I’m in a fluid mechanics class at university and I’m bored out of my mind every day. Lindy just gave us all a lesson with a real life example and I was glued to the screen the whole time. So grateful for this channel, and so glad I hasn’t gone the way of many other channels on TH-cam.
This was the first video of yours I've watched! I love the way you break down the topic and stuff, this is a really appealing format you have here. Thank you for sharing this knowledge with us, you've gained a subscriber!
3:57 why did he choose cm? edit: I mean, why doesn't he use something like meters or kilometers... I guess it's trivial to do the conversion but it feels a little silly...
@@MrDino1953 In the UK we use the metric system almost all the time, including throughout science, engineering, cookery etc. Young people here don't understand feet and inches. There are just a few things we use imperial for, like pipe diameters, waist sizes of clothes, and screen sizes, which are in inches (here and everywhere), distances mainly in miles, and we use some imperial measurements colloquially.
3:55 Thanks for the translation to French :D The Bay of Fundy has a very exciting tidal range of ~16 metres (~52 feet in English) but there's a lot of very exceptional nonsense going on there, resulting in resonance. If it had a nice deep bottom through it, and on either side, it would be quite uneventful.
Tides in some parts of Atlantic Canada, especially the Bay of Fundy in between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia has the most extreme tides in the world, at over 50 feet!
But that's because of resonance. Global average tides are about 1m and, very roughly speaking, any time you see tides significantly bigger than that, it's because local conditions are funneling the water.
The way I assumed the tides work is bulge in the water moving from left to right. When the high point of the bulge is slightly left of Gibraltar, that means on the right there is an almost high point, meaning the water from inside the Mediterranean is also pulled up higher towards the straight.
this is like listening to your adhd friend who just went on a wikipedia binge and is trying to tell you everything he just learned but the facts are getting muddled and he's trying to make up for it with enthusiasm and you can't change the subject so you're just stuck saying "oh, cool" over and over again hoping he'll stop soon.
Well, you might want to check your sources again before generalising. While the *average* tide in the Mediterranean is really just a bit more than 10 cm (4"), it may differ quite a lot with a tide of up to 1.2m (4 ft) in Venice (top of Adria) and a good 2m (7ft) in Gabes at the Tunisian coast. In both regions the geography works quite like in the Atlantic.
I just looked up tides at different places, and it seems at the eastern end sometimes a tide is just skipped. On 10 Oct Alexandria (next week, if you want a flight to see it) has a high at 1:09 am, then a low at 9:28 am, and then 18 hours of slow rise until the high at 4:16 am the next day. And that 18 hour rise is just 6 cm or 0.06 m. Tunis doesn't skip that tide, but has only a 2 cm rise.
The subject of tides is fascinating. You have the Bay of Fundy in Canada which has tides as extreme as 50 ft. Meanwhile, on the Caribbean (Atlantic) end of the Panama Canal there is barely any tidal change during the day, while at the Pacific end the tides are 20 ft.
For an extreme, the eastern end of the Medditeranean sometimes doesn't even do a tidal cycle. Next week Alexandria skips a cycle (it goes from a low directly to a high 18 hours later) and Tripoli has a difference between high and low of 0 (a low of 14 cm over standard zero, then a high of 19 cm over standard, than a low of 19 cm and then a high of 26 cm)
This set it really nice. The lighting is a little moody and dramatic, while not being too far from cozy and naturalistic. You could imagine a conveniently placed sky-light striking the speaker just so.
the balance bit reminds me of the reasoning behind the fact all the planets in the solar system keep to a certain rhythm relative to each other. they all tug and nudge each other in a way so they stay in perfect everlasting balance.
"they stay in perfect everlasting balance" is an assumption, on your part, not a proved fact. There is evidence that the orbits of planets have changed, significantly, over the history of the solar system.
Long term yes: but on a timescale of billions of years we can't be confident that it will remain stable. The book "Newton's Clock: Chaos in the Solar System" is worth reading on that topic.
@@trueriver1950 Orbits are perfect integrating engines. The tiniest imbalance of influence just keeps accumulating. So what looks perfectly stable, on our observing timescale, if it involves three or more bodies, is almost always, slowly accumulating change.
This video was perfectly timed! I was in Spain on the Mediterranean side last weekend and was wondering why there was no tidal change. Then this video gets recommended, thanks!
Do you think he explained the question? I don't. If the Mediterranean has a relatively constant level - little tidal range - then any water flowing out due to greater density is balanced by water flowing in. That has nothing to do with tides. Tides actually vary greatly around the Atlantic due to variation in near-shore sea depth and shoreline shape, among other factors. So the question is, if the surface water is driven higher in the East Atlantic at the entrance to the Mediterranean, but it doesn't rise an equivalent amount in the immediately adjacent waters of the Western Mediterranean, then why do they balance? I don't see how the evaporation factor has anything to do with it.
The answer is straight up incorrect: Millions of litres of water flow through the straits on a daily basis. Whilst he got the facts a little wrong, I think he managed to outline the principle: That there are many variables hidden to us laymen that make it a little unintuitive. Evaporation is one of those variables, it's simply not the primary one. Case in point, it's not that the Gibraltar strait is wide or deep that allows for this appearance of equilibrium but is in fact because it's relatively narrow, which limits the rate at which water flows from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean and vice versa. The difference in salinity mentioned also further exacerbates this bottlenecking of flow. There is simply not enough time before the tide changes for enough water to have moved in *either* direction to make a particularly noticable difference.
I think the point of evaporation is to cause the two-way flow due to salinity, and Lindy is claiming that that two-way flow causes enough friction to slow the tides. Personally I think a simpler explanation is that the straights are several miles long, and 20 foot spread over several miles is a very gentle slope.
I agree, he didn’t. The explanation is that the tidal range of the Atlantic Ocean near Gibraltar is only about one meter, which is three feet. This isn’t enough height to cause a dramatic change in the current in the long Gibraltar strait. The depth of the straight would also probably stop a tidal bore from forming even if the tidal range was 6 meters, since the wave propagation speed is so high.
@@robinbennett5994 Not even that much. At Cadiz, about 65 km (40 mi) north of the straight on the Atlantic side, the tide is only between 0.9 and 3.5 m, about 3-11 ft. At Tangier, at the western end of of the straight right next to the Atlantic, it's down to 0.7-2.5 m At Gibraltar, on the eastern end it's 0.2-1.0 m. At Tunis, halfway through the basin the tides are down to 0.1-0.3 m. In Alexandria, at the eastern end the highest tide is also about 0.3 m and the lowest is simply skipped. (happens next on 10 Oct, when there is only one high at 1:09 am and and one low at 9:26 am, the next high after that is at 4:16 am the next day. The "afternoon tide" is simply doesn't happen, it's just 18 hours of slow rise) But for the smallest that isn't skipped it's about 5 cm, or about 2 inches.
@Lindeybeige: The tidal current makes a bigger difference than the water level. When the tide is rising, the ocean tries to push you to shore. When the tide is falling the ocean tries to drag you away from the shore. For modern ships it's a fuel conservation thing, for smaller craft it can keep you from arriving to or leaving the beach against the tide. P.S. Ididn't believe the old wive's tales, so I got stuck for an extra 2 hours on an island for not checking the tide book. (North Pacific tides, but I was using a 20hp outboard, not a pair of longboat oars)
The mid ocean tidal range is maybe 1m, no where near 8 to 20 feet. Coastal tidal range is due to the interaction with the bottom and the wave riding up on the momentum of the water. That's how Fundi gets such extreme tides.
I love the way you explain things! Even if we have different views on certain things, whoever put the work in finding out and understanding the world around us has full right to his or her opinion. You think, and make your audience think with you, and this is amazing. Respect!
You my good Sir, definitely march to the beat of your own drum and what a fantastic beat it is. Subscribed! Also that was a very interesting and entertaining explanation. If only most teachers in schools today, were as passionate and animated as you are, I think we'd be in a far better state, educationally speaking.
The same could be said about the great oceans like the Atlantic and Pacific, why are they not growing bigger with the addition of melting ice, rain, the great and the lesser rivers. Evaporation! The water cycle. We fool ourselves when looking at a map that the Mediterranean is some sort of large lake, it is not. It is a sea! And not some tiny sea like the Irish sea, it is enormous. It is more like a small ocean.
@@offshoretomorrow3346 I don’t mind if he is wearing a speedo or a fancy suit. I have to google what fathom are. I think common people from de UK and the US don’t get it right
@@santiagojaviersanchezmohli6771sorry that our refusal to capitulate to the French Cult of Reason and its arbitrary measures causes extra clicks googling. When one’s sonar goes out, meeting out the depth gauge rope by the fathom is far more intuitive than by the meter.
This makes understanding evaporation kuch easier to understand, when understanding that the less dense fresh water is constantly being evaporated, whereas what's left is the much denser saltwater. Makes a lot of sense, thanks large in part to Lindy's metaphorical examples, I get descriptive visuals to help me understand this concept.
I knew about the lack of tidal difference in the Mediterranean Sea, but had never thought about the the tidal flow through the Straits of Gibraltar, nor thought how wide they were. It is this lack of understanding about how very, very big things are that leads to the flat Earthers and they way they can not perceive on a world scale.
The Mediterranean is very big. Years ago I stumbled on a map of land visibility in the Mediterranean and there are large patches where you can't see land in any direction.
It’s worth noting that rivers do not reduce the salinity of a body of water, they’re the reason for its salinity in the first place. Rivers erode minerals from rock beds and soil and deposit them into the seas and oceans. The reason rivers aren’t salty is because they’re moving and there isn’t enough of a concentration of salt to make a difference due to this.
Some facts but wrongly applied. Yes the salinity comes from the fresh water but when the fresh water meets the sea it is far less saline and so does dilute the salinity of the sea water to some extent. It is only then the long-term and constant evaporation of the sea water that increases the salinity of the sea. So it can reduce the salinity and also be the reason/source of the salinity.
That WAS true, eons ago, when there was still salts in large quantities to be easily leached. Look at the Baltic Sea, which is only around 12'000 years old. It is a (almost) fresh water lake, with a salinity 5 times less than that of the North Sea, to which it is connected.
I’m from Valencia, (Spanish Mediterranean area) and the first time I saw the Atlantic wast at 27 y/o and I was IMPRESSED with tides. Like I know how they work, but swing the difference between high and low tides it truly stills blow my mind 🤯
The evaporation of the Mediterranean Sea is so great that IN ADDITION to evaporating all of the rain and the water from the big rivers, if you plug the Gibraltar, the sea level in the Med will drop by 1 meter every year.
@@HappyBeezerStudios That's not more precise. That's exactly the same. And it's so exact that I seriously doubt that it's correct. Not to mention that if you plug the Gibraltar, the level of the western Mediterranean would drop faster than in the eastern Mediterranean. So making such a prediction would simply not be correct.
@@dgoodman1484 The evaporation of the Mediterranean has been evaluated by several studies. Their results range between 1060 and 1500 mm per year. So, the 1m per year figure of @Tjalve is conservative!
Having sailed around the Aegean and Ionian seas for the best part of 27 years, I can confirm that the the tidal ranges are un-noticeable if not negligible no matter the phase of the moon.
Never heard a believer in creation use the balance of a geophysical system as proof of a creator, so that bit was wasted breath. Otherwise an interesting and worthwhile video.
Scroll a bit down and you'll find at least two comments saying that the balance leads back to a creator that made the universe exactly so that natural forces will cause stuff to be balanced.
This is fascinating. There are similar, albeit much smaller geographic features all over the Pacific coast of Canada that experience huge tidal flows. You can literally look "up hill" when downstream of these channels.
Yachtsman: The Royal Yachting Association allow certification courses at Gibraltar and Atlantic side but not in the Mediterranean because the tides offer no test of navigation or seamanship.
That last point. Boy is that hard for some people to fathom. "No grand design. It's there because that was where it settled for thousands and thousands years ago. And was push for it to chance form that equilibrium".
Yup. It must have been "interesting" to be around when the straight first formed. Systems *seeking* equilibrium can oscillate wildly (which is one reason we see many more tornadoes, hurricanes, etc as the planet is adjusting to our absurd emissions).
I worked on blimps many years ago. I remember being amazed it would take most of an hour to deflate one even with a hole big enough for me to walk through.
That one also makes all the cool 'being sucked out a tiny hole into spaaaaaaaace' crises in science fiction way less exciting in real life too. What is a dramatic moment on a tv show is maintenance on the ISS.
@@Dandelion_Stitches because there you go through an airlock, and don't open the hatch at 1 bar pressure (more like 0.01 bar residual afaik).
If you *were* to open the hatch like in the movies, you'd absolutely get pretty violent explosive decompression
Think of cabin failures of aircraft at altitude (people have been sucked out!), but even worse
@@jonashageboke8993 They are sucked out because of the airspeed, something that is 0 in space.
@@Dandelion_Stitches Are you saying the ISS has holes, directly connecting space & inside, regularly during maintenance? What
@Yoshi92 Yes. Often they repair them with duct tape.
You have a few things backwards here...
The strait being 8 miles wide isn't the important thing. The important thing is that it is about 40 miles long. There may be a difference in water level between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean of a few metres due to the tides, but that's spread over 40 miles. It's an incline of less than 0.005°. Completely negligible. There is no sudden change in water level like water going over a dam.
The lack of strong tides in the Mediterranean isn't because the straight is wide, but because it is narrow. There just isn't room to get enough water in and out. The surface area of the Mediterranean is 2.5 million square kilometres. That means to raise the level by a metre you need 2.5 trillion cubic metres of water. A difference in water height of a few metres isn't going to create a flow anywhere near enough to move that much water in a few hours though an 8 mile wide gap.
Yep 👍
This seems to be a clearer and more-feasible explanation than all the friction and evaporation, etc.
Correct! Imagine a slow-flowing, well-navigable river like the Mississippi. Its average gradient is 0.01 %.
The tidal range of the Atlantic before the Gibraltar Straight is not some crazy 20 ft or so... that only happens because of some weird shore geographies... no, that tidal range is only about 3 feet or 1 meter. The tidal range in the Western Mediterranean is about 1 foot , and it is not simultaneous to the Atlantic tide!
The maximum difference level of the 2 bodies of water can therefore not be more than 4 ft, spread over about a 40-mile long chanel. The gradient is therefore
Correct . It is that simple.
Read REEDS or an Admiralty publication on the matter.
Is just basic physics and engineering.
Andrew
r/theydidthemath
On evaporation: When I lived in Ireland, a sopping wet pair of jeans would take multiple days to fully dry if hung up (indoors, not in a heated cupboard. Outdoors not possible most the time due to rain). I live in Spain now. A sopping wet pair of jeans left in direct sunlight will be bone dry in less than half an hour
You appreciate the convenience, but I'm sure you miss the expanse of green flourishing vegetation.
A well known meteorological fact is that the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plains.
Oh goodness, I'm in England, and I've been trying to get a black cardigan dry all week! The weather has been too changeable to risk drying it outside.
@@Rob-e8w plain, not plains
If you're regularly drying jeans (or any other dyed clothing) in direct sunlight, make sure you have them turned inside out, otherwise they will fade. [Edit: They will fade anyway, but direct UV sunlight will greatly speed up that process.] (Laundry advice from Queensland, Australia)
Thanks Lindy but I only asked where you were going on holiday this year...
😂😂😂
I imagine this is how he talks in real life .... and the collaboration videos he has done tend to confirm this
But this is why I follow him ...
I’m still waiting for your book about nothing in particular and everything in general
When he shows you the photos the physics of light will begin the conversation...
Remember all those holidays het took off of all that 'in search of hannibal' money? That was fun for the people who paid for that.
I worked as a skipper on a yacht in Greece some years ago. The weather, highs and depressions, had a bigger effect on the water level than the tides.
It's the same in the Baltic sea, air pressure and sometimes wind pushing the water to one side or end of the sea can change water heights by up to ±1 metre in places. The tidal effect is theoretically there, but it's only about 1 cm iirc, completely unnoticeable compared to the other factors.
And for a similar reason, the Danish straits are too narrow and shallow.
"The Mediterranean Sea is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to Mediterranean Sea." Apologies to Douglas Adams but sometimes I get that same vibe, in a good way, from these Lindybeige chats!
I hate how Elon Musk pretends to read his stuff to make himself look “cultured”
@@Pangloss6413 Is Musk in the room with us right now?
EVERYONE has read HHG, mate. Calm down a bit, you'll live longer.
@@Pangloss6413ah, yes. because Douglas Adams is what people read to appear cultured...
The budget this guy got for writing a graphic novel was also unbelievably big, and he took the money to go on fun trips and make videos for more money, meanwhile, the people who invested got nothing. What a top notch guy this lindybeige is right?
@@Realtimehammerhuh?
Homeless man delivers lecture on tidal dynamics. Is confused when passers-by put dollars in his lap.
I always thought it was becuase the Moroccans thickened the water with the liberal application of couscous
mmm, a plausible hypothesis.
Now I'm craving some couscous
No, it's because Lindy "stole" a lot of money from his fanbase by promising a graphic novel, not delivering, and buying the moroccans off to thicken the water.
Of coursecourse!
@Realtimehammer people who be DESPERATE for attention
9:58 Correction: Any system will either find a point of balance, or cease to be. And we just can't look at all those systems that aren't any more.
The third possibility is if the ceasing is slow, we may glimpse it. Such as, the temperature of the earth's core, which is always going down, or the sun's stellar evolution, which is a one way street.
Also, it really depends what you count as a single state, I suppose. The temperature of different parts of the earth is constantly out of balance because of its spin and the sun, which creates incredibly intricate fractals of weather and whatnot. Is it more correct to view the clouds as chaos, whose positions are fundamentally impossible to predict in the long term, or the broad patterns in that weather as a climatic "point of balance"? I don't think its reasonable to call one perspective more correct than the other.
@@terdragontra8900 indeed. Though I'm pretty sure that in most contexts one is more Useful than the other (which is which may vary).
That isnt also proof of a creator
Sorry, not true. Many permanent systems are dynamic and do not tend to equilibrium. The economy is one (despite what neoclassical economists may fantasize). Predator-prey population dynamics is another. Happy to concede that many other systems do tend to equilibrium though.
@@briskyoungploughboy Predator prey systems and the economy are both definitely NOT permanent lolll, the Mediterranean is a millions-year-old continentally big geological feature; humanity existed as barely upright Australopithecus 5 million years ago. Its not the same as seas or mountains and valleys
A simpler explanation: The distance between Gibraltar and Italy is ~2000km. If the difference in tides is about 10m, that is a gradient of 1-in-200 000. A few google searches puts the tides in Portugal and Gibraltar as 4m and 1m respectively, at a distance of 300km. That's still only a 1-in-100 000 gradient.
There’s also the point that the gravitational potentials that cause tides vary east to west. In other words, the height of the head of water that one would think should be rushing through the strait isn’t as broad east to west as one might think. Rather than “the whole of the Atlantic Ocean”, it’s only a couple hundred miles of water that has that hump to it, pushing against the whole of the Mediterranean.
@@markfergerson2145 Well said, sir.
But 1 in 100000 is greater than 1 in 200000
Ok so for the dummies here (like myself), could you please explain what geographic conditions WOULD create a gigantic tidal tsunami? E.g. would Italy have to be closer to the strait?
@@jonnies i'm fairly certain nothing would create a tidal tsunami because tide is caused by a gradual gravity difference and a tsunami by impact. unless the moon suddenly appears out of nowhere that just shouldn't happen.
a huge tidal flood would happen if there is a fragile balance point. think of a shallow ridge between water and emptiness. it's high enough and stable enough to keep the water off even through high tide but the open side is constantly eroded by wind and rain. at some point it becomes too narrow and the pressure of a high tide breaks the fragile top, eroding lower - the flooding of the mediterranean sea.
considering man-made structures instead of purely geographical stuff this can happen with a dam in the netherlands when the water level rises.
The history of the Mediterranean is telling. Over the last 50 million years, as Africa has moved north, the strait of Gibraltar has closed, only to open again due to erosion.
When the strait closes, the Mediterranean dries up, leaving an extremely hot and barren salt desert. It's so hot due to the low altitude; as air moves down it gets denser and heats up.
The rivers flowing into the Mediterranean alone would not keep it full, but would form much smaller, evaporating lakes in places.
When erosion would open the strait, a massive tsunami would flood the basin. In general, systems tend towards equilibrium. A daily tsunami would cause massive changes to the landscape until it ceases. I imagine that one process would be widening the strait enough to reach a steadier state.
If you want more detail, the book "otherlands" by Thomas Halliday is where I read about this the cyclic history of the Mediterranean.
Heard it could get up to 70°C in the dense atmosphere at the bottom of a dried out Mediterranean - that's a bit much.
Erosion stops it from closing again btw, if sea levels lower due to glaciation then we could see it close again.
Mediterranean Salinity Crisis. A cool day at the bottom being 135F lol
I reckon that the biblical flood is a folk memory of one of these flooding events, suitably altered to fit the Christian narritive
@@DanMurphy-w3m Incorrect; the Mediterranean last flooded 5.33 million years ago, long before humans existed.
Clearly the might of the British empire is holding back the tide.
YAY Pax Britannia!!
Nah, the tide has re-directed round the corner in Calais rubber boats. Daily channel tsunamis are quite common in Dover.
And clearly the arrogance of Lindy is holding back any semblence of progress of the graphic novel he promised 8 years ago. Nice to see he took the money of his fans to make something he never finished and seems not to intend to finish
😂😂😂
Perhaps the best troll comment of the century 😂😂😂 bravo!
The most amazing thing about you, is that there are no cuts, ever. Truly a professional.
I’m a Pacific Ocean enjoyer and my city is 80 miles inland from the ocean and we still receive a noticeable tidal change in our river (Sacramento river)
Very strong and noticeable at Rio Vista even up to the sloughs of Grizzly Island. Like a strong river either direction. Best time to fish!
I live 362 km (225 mi) upriver and currently we get on average about 3.5 m (11.5 ft) at the weir. But that varies between 2.09m (6.8 ft) and 5.52 m (18.1 ft)
I was thinking about the tidal currents going through the Golden Gate during this whole video. Unprepared at the wrong time of day can end badly.
Grew up near the shores of San Pablo Bay (NW Contra Costa) and used to explore the mud flats during low tide.
Also used to camp/fish in the delta as a kid and was always intrigued by how much the tides affected the waters there. (Also some gnarly currents.)
Same here in Stockton, it's crazy how much the tides affect the water levels in the sloughs and smaller rivers. Makes me think of the tsunami that came from Japan all the up the rivers, bashing boats and docks together. Never expected that!
so you must be checking Japanese earthquakes on an hourly basis then?
You do love an obscure unit of measurement LB!
We had miles, fathoms, "rifle round reach", "panamaxes", feet, "beams"....all just to describe the size of the straight of Gibraltar! Colour me impressed.
FYI, 8 miles is also about 104,000 sandwiches.
how many smoots?
Ham or cheese?
@@bungle8111 both. With Coleslaw and lettuce. King of sandwiches
How many football fields? Asking for an American friend.
@@skaldlouiscyphre2453 7
In Atlantic Canada there's a place called reversing falls. 50 foot tide has a pushing match against watershed rivers. There is a phenomena called Tidal Bore where a wave travels upriver. Some can surf this wave.
There's a place in NW Australia called the horizontal waterfall. Similar setup.
There's a famous bore on the river Severn in the UK too. It occurs primarily on the "spring tides" near the spring and autumn equinoxes.
You are mixing stories. The Reversing Falls on the Saint John River are at a ridge. At low tide the river falls into the ocean. At high tide water rushes inland, more like a rapids. This configuration does not cause a bore. Some other rivers have them though.
Fun fact, the Saint John River is tidal 150km from the ocean.
The River Severn in SW England also has a bore, it's not just a Canadian thing: tho in fairness the Severn cannot compete with the reversing falls for dramatic effect
@@trueriver1950 I mentioned the Severn bore 9 days ago. ^
I will never cease to be entertained by how Lloyd manages to embody a character of both a crazed conspiracy theorist and the cool uncle who produces wonders of fancy from the tools in his shed, at the same time. A wonderful historian indeed.
I've always thought he was trying to land a spot as the next Dr. Who........
Which conspiracies have been false?
The flow rate through the street of Gibraltar is cross section x velocity. The cross section is fairly small and the velocity is limited by friction with the sea floor and turbulence due to the other currents Lindy mentioned. Turns out this flow rate is not sufficient to raise and lower the water level in the Med much.
I've been through there on a submarine submerged over a dozen times in my career and it's always hairy. The underwater river of fresher water and differences in salinity make depth keeping quite an endeavor 😂(STS1 SS)RET USS SAN JUAN SSN-751 /USS TOLEDO SSN- 769
I read many many years ago that Donitz resisted sending U-boats into the Med during WW II because it was a one way ticket. They could enter submerged, catching a good tail wind (tail current?) and zip through fast enough to avoid the British and not suffocate. But they were too slow to fight that submerged head current coming back out, and if they tried it on the surface, they'd be moving ducks for the British.
And if I'd stuck around just a few seconds longer, I'd have seen his ending quote mentioning half that.
Me 2
@@grizwoldphantasia5005 There were plenty of U boats in the Med. ASk the guys and gals on the Malta convoys.
@@68404 I said "resisted", not prevented. Donitz knew that every single Med U-boat was trapped there and could never rejoin the Battle of the Atlantic, which was more important, since every target in the Med had been a target in the Atlantic.
Can confirm. The Mediterranean is a veeeeery big spoon. Lot's of surface area to evaporate water from.
And shallow. The Atlantic also has a lot of evaporation but it's much deeper - so it's _relatively_ less.
@@_Mentat So is the Atlantic a veeeeeery veeeeeery big bowl then?
@@fibber2uAtlantic is also colder
@@Yatagurusu A bowl of
gazpacho then ????
You might think that would lead to rain forest like conditions in North Africa but alas no. Complex systems are full of variables.
An interesting geological fact is the increasing salinity from evaporation could eventually lead to the entire Mediterranean filling up with thousands of feet of salt as the concentration gets high enough to force the excess to crystallize and fall out of solution. The same process is responsible for filling much of the Gulf of Mexico with salt, as the area used to be a deep tropical sea with no outlet connected to the broader ocean. The high salinity at depth limited the organisms that could survive there, so organic materials sinking from the surface (dead plankton, algea, fish, crustaceans, etc.) wouldn't decompose before getting trapped in the accumulating layers of salt. Over time more sediment was deposited on top from inland erosion being washed out to sea. The trapped organisms eventually turned into oil and gas from the pressure, and the erosion sediment concreted into impermeable sedimentary rock layers that trapped the oil and gas under the sea floor, which is what companies like BP drill for today.
Thanks for posting! I always wondered why the Gulf had oil deposits.
Med water is incredibly salty. I worked on the Canal du Rhone à Sète, mostly fed by sea water, years ago and we had a boat, 6 weeks old, which nearly sank because of electrolysis between bronze and steel fittings. The galvanised steel stern tube corroded through and 3/4inch steel bolt heads disappeared because the salt water acts like acid. The stern tube was fibre-glassed to the hull as a quick repair. The heads of new steel bolts fitted as an emergency measure disappeared in 2 weeks. The bolts and stern tube were replaced with brass and gave no further problem.
No diodes?
@@sjaaktrekhaak253 They were built by a company situated on a river, so they never bothered to fit anodes to any boats they built.
By the way, they are called anodes, not diodes.
@@williamgeorgefraser I stand corrected.
Actually, standing of course is meant figuratively as I cannot really describe my litteral position right now. It's probably best destribed as something between sitting, laying and hanging as I'm constantly shfiting and moving around on my couch desparately trying to fight the urge to vomit and make it though the day.
Oh well, at least I get to pathetically blame my above mentioned mistake on being sick with some stomac bug.
Anyway, hope you're having a great day!
@@sjaaktrekhaak253 hope you feel better soon
The salt water actually works as an alkaline electrolyte, not an acid.
I love these videos. You are like Socrates just talking at length in depth and in an engaging manner whatever subject may be crossing your mind. Love these!
Hmm, so when Italians say to cook pasta in water "as salty as the sea" they mean as salty as the Mediterranean and not the Atlantic, I assume.
There's a video by Adam Ragusea about salting pasta water, and I believe he found that normal salted water for cooking is only about 10% as salty as average sea water. Cooking with Mediterranean water would be intense
_It's really just an expression, Adam Ragusea made a video about it_
@@Zestrayswede I know, but maybe it's based in some truth?
@@coryman125 Oh, wow, I didn't think it was that big of a difference! Cooking with water from the Dead Sea would be really bad, then. I should watch that video. I'm already subscribed to his channel.
I suspect it refers to natural reaction that you have when tasting sea water, you tend to spit it out.. like add as little salt as possible but not so little that you can just drink it like regular water, it should be just enough to be unpleasant
Around 5 million years ago, the Mediterranean evaporated almost completely. Essentially leaving a salt desert larger than a typical country kilometers below sea level and a few very inhospitable large salt lakes. The weather was likely extremely hot in that basin and had humans existed at the time they would have found it very difficult to live there.
Ten years watching this channel and still one of my favorites I jump to watch when I see a new upload. Great stuff Mr. Lloyd
Technicality: the Atlantic doesn't go up and down. The water moves around a little, humping up in an area that travels around it.
High tide at La Rochelle 5:10 PM, which is 16:10 UTC. High tide at Lisbon 3:29 PM, which is 15:29 UTC. High tide at St. John's, Newfoundland, 8:10 PM, which is 23:59 UTC because Newfoundland is in one of those half-hour time zones. High tide in Baltimore on the Chesapeake Bay 6:49 PM, which is 23:49 UTC. High tide at Bull Street, Savannah, Georgia, USA 8:41 PM, which is 01:41 UTC and actually tomorrow morning from La Rochelle's point of view.
It gets even weirder in the Strait of Dover, what with the tides coming in and going out via the west end of the Channel and via the North Sea at different times.
Technically all the tides in the world are caused by the moon dragging the surface of the water into a hump which travels around the world lagging slightly behind it. Also slightly confused by the 5° additional obliquity in the orbit of the Moon to the existing 23.44° equatorial obliquity of the Earth's inclination in its orbit around the Sun.
The most interesting thing are the points with no tides, so called amphidromic points.
Thank you for posting this sequence. I knew the tide shifted like this, but didn't have a good mental picture.
Also, greetings as a friend from Beau/Belle's channels. Always fun to see familiar faces, so-to-speak.✌️😎🍀
When I’m king of the world, I’m banning all half-hour time zones.
Gibraltar Rocks
Also apes British seaside resorts.
700 to 900 meters deep, oh god thats deep. Im familiar with my Rīgas gulf which is like 26 meters deep.
omg) I assumed it was 7-9 km and though “it sounds about right”..
yeah, it explains why there is no tunnels or bridges that connect this parts of the world.. it would be dope otherwise
@@a.noumenThere are many reasons for there not being a bridge or a tunnel there. That is not one if them necessarily.
The Baltic has little evaporation and so is much less salty than the Atlantic. When I moved to Sweden I was surprized to see how much (1.5 meters at times) the water level in the Baltic goes up and down. It has nothing to do with the tides or the runoff it is because it is fairly shallow and the wind pushes the water around.
@@williamgarner6779 The baltic sea is so salty you can actually drink it and get hydrated. Its salinity ranges from 0,3% to 0,9% which is less than the salinity of human blood at 0,9%. Dont drink it tho the baltic is very poluted, but in event of emergency when youre stuck on a boat with no water Baltic sea water is drinkable.
An example of how that initially expected interaction in the Gibraltar strait would look would be "slufters". Tidal salt marches that form behind a small, but permanent, breach in the coastal dunes. it creates a landscape of shallow puddles connected by a few streams that get completely flooded every flood and can almost entirely dry up every ebb. It creates an incredibly dynamic ecosystem because it, on a scale, suffers from massive floods twice a day
You can't taste the difference in salinity (they're both painfully salty) but you can slightly feel the difference in buoyancy when you swim in the Atlantic compared to swimming in the Mediterranean. At leat if you're like me, pretty long and skinny, I've only recently gained enough belly fat to be able to somewhat float in fresh water. But when I was younger and skinnier; I could not float at all in fresh water without constantly threading water. If I took a deep breath and just went limp, with full lungs I would bob around with only the very top of my back occasionally touching the surface and then dip below again. In the North sea here in Norway I would still not float enough to be useful but my back would stay at the surface. In the Mediterranean I could with some effort float high enough to breathe (as long as I didn't empty my lungs too much) without constantly swimming.
Roman soldiers floated on the Dead Sea in armor.
@@blastulae The dead sea is the saltiest sea known to man, even twitter isn't that salty!
I hate swimming for this reason. I'm constantly almost-drowning and its not at all fun for me.
I learned to swim in the Med in 1953, at the age of Five. We were living in Gibraltar at the time. We left there in 1960, when I was 12 years of age.
@@russbetts1467Did it feel strange to swim in less salty waters afterward ?
0:30 the writer got it wrong not because he’s American, but because the writer in question is Rian Johnson
As an American, can confirm. I live very far from the ocean and I am not familiar with how tides affect ships at all.
@@MatthewTheWanderer Tides come in tides go out, can't explain that.
@@Salamander96 Well I live next to Strangford lough (the wee sea between the Ards penisula & the South down area in northern Ireland) & I can tell ye that the tides have no effect on the ferry between the towns of Portaferry & Strangford bar the rare time where their is extreme flooding like after the massive storms that flooded Downpatrick last year other than that no tides have effects.
@@Salamander96its the gravitational effect the Moon exerts on the Earth.
@@Salamander96 Never a miscommunication
Engineer here: amazing video and really insightful. Only thing to nitpick is that water is absolutely NOT a lubricant. Keep up the amazing content!
I thought water was a solvent
As a chemist, I can tell you water CAN be a lubricant. It depends on whether the water is on a hydrophilic or hydrophobic surface.
Water happens to be a better lubricant than oil - that's why steam engines don't wear out.....
Lindybeige, the passionate teacher I never had.
Thanks for uploading :)
Lindy is up late
Not really
This is a question that I didn't even know I needed an answer for. Well done!
That friggin Hercules always sticking his big foot where it doesn't belong.
Like father like son.
@@Hebdomad7 ha, Achilles had a bigger 'foot' problem.
Love your channel Lindy.
Love that you find yourself scratching your head about something, discover the answer is very interesting, and the run to tell all your friends about the interesting thing you just learned.
I do that with friends and family. They get a ton of random, unsolicited "wow did you guys know..." text messages from me.
Having sailed the Straits probably 300 times. If you get your departure time wrong on Springs, you sometimes feel like there is a huge tidal tsunami. It's easy to miss the bar in Ceuta if you bugger it up.
...and THAT is with a modern sailboat! Imagine an ancient merchant ship with a top speed of around 5kt under most favorable wind!
Fantastic video, Lindybeige! Learned a few things!
I’m in a fluid mechanics class at university and I’m bored out of my mind every day. Lindy just gave us all a lesson with a real life example and I was glued to the screen the whole time. So grateful for this channel, and so glad I hasn’t gone the way of many other channels on TH-cam.
This was the first video of yours I've watched! I love the way you break down the topic and stuff, this is a really appealing format you have here. Thank you for sharing this knowledge with us, you've gained a subscriber!
3:57 why did he choose cm?
edit: I mean, why doesn't he use something like meters or kilometers... I guess it's trivial to do the conversion but it feels a little silly...
He’s british and has no idea how the metric system, or the mathematical concept of significant figures works.
Because it's what the vast majority of the world uses!
@@MrDino1953 In the UK we use the metric system almost all the time, including throughout science, engineering, cookery etc. Young people here don't understand feet and inches. There are just a few things we use imperial for, like pipe diameters, waist sizes of clothes, and screen sizes, which are in inches (here and everywhere), distances mainly in miles, and we use some imperial measurements colloquially.
I suppose he could have used mm? Or mirons?
You missed the joke - 73,152cm to 91,440cm "in french". (metric system originated from France)
For the record, the so called balanced system of tides in Gibraltar (or anywhere) is still in the process of change, just very slow one.
3:55 Thanks for the translation to French :D
The Bay of Fundy has a very exciting tidal range of ~16 metres (~52 feet in English) but there's a lot of very exceptional nonsense going on there, resulting in resonance. If it had a nice deep bottom through it, and on either side, it would be quite uneventful.
*American
I was wondering about the exact same thing. Good to know I'm not alone with these kind of troubles.
Now you should worry about why there's more tide at Venice than anywhere else in the med...
I've missed you Lindy and I've never met you. Thanks for all you do.
Much love from Canada
I can confirm water is not excellent at lubricating. For the sake of decency, I'll just say I know it by personnal experience.
Try hitting it in the car going 70 miles an hour as in falling off a bridge or driving into a lake, not slippery
Didn’t the U Boat in “Das Boot” coast into the Med by riding the current?
They tried until a British destroyer attacked them. Great movie! I especially love the "Tipperary " song.
damn!! now i have the theme tune!!
@@andyf4292 it is a fantastic tune!
@@stuartaaron613 great film
ALARM!
Tides in some parts of Atlantic Canada, especially the Bay of Fundy in between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia has the most extreme tides in the world, at over 50 feet!
Bathymetry is an amazing thing.
I thought Canada went metric..
@@68404 They did, but I didn't.
But that's because of resonance. Global average tides are about 1m and, very roughly speaking, any time you see tides significantly bigger than that, it's because local conditions are funneling the water.
@@beeble2003 Right, I know, and funneling is exactly what is going on in the Bay of Fundy.
The way I assumed the tides work is bulge in the water moving from left to right. When the high point of the bulge is slightly left of Gibraltar, that means on the right there is an almost high point, meaning the water from inside the Mediterranean is also pulled up higher towards the straight.
@8:35 what is the word spoken in the sentence four tides a day, five times on “materdays” and wednesdays?
I heard it as Saturdays
I heard it as 5 times and matinee's on Wednesdays. I believe it is a theater reference due to Poseidon putting on a show.
Matinees. He was jokingly likening tide times to theatre schedules.
Holy moly nice topic idea!
this is like listening to your adhd friend who just went on a wikipedia binge and is trying to tell you everything he just learned but the facts are getting muddled and he's trying to make up for it with enthusiasm and you can't change the subject so you're just stuck saying "oh, cool" over and over again hoping he'll stop soon.
The Great Lakes even have tides. This shocks me that the Mediterranean is so chill
2:34 Heh, "strait" away 😏
Love these types of videos from you, Lloyd!
Well, you might want to check your sources again before generalising. While the *average* tide in the Mediterranean is really just a bit more than 10 cm (4"), it may differ quite a lot with a tide of up to 1.2m (4 ft) in Venice (top of Adria) and a good 2m (7ft) in Gabes at the Tunisian coast. In both regions the geography works quite like in the Atlantic.
Can confirm, have been in Venice when the tide came in and cut me off from my hotel entrance
I just looked up tides at different places, and it seems at the eastern end sometimes a tide is just skipped.
On 10 Oct Alexandria (next week, if you want a flight to see it) has a high at 1:09 am, then a low at 9:28 am, and then 18 hours of slow rise until the high at 4:16 am the next day.
And that 18 hour rise is just 6 cm or 0.06 m.
Tunis doesn't skip that tide, but has only a 2 cm rise.
Yes Lloyd! This style of video is my favourite.
The subject of tides is fascinating. You have the Bay of Fundy in Canada which has tides as extreme as 50 ft. Meanwhile, on the Caribbean (Atlantic) end of the Panama Canal there is barely any tidal change during the day, while at the Pacific end the tides are 20 ft.
For an extreme, the eastern end of the Medditeranean sometimes doesn't even do a tidal cycle.
Next week Alexandria skips a cycle (it goes from a low directly to a high 18 hours later) and Tripoli has a difference between high and low of 0 (a low of 14 cm over standard zero, then a high of 19 cm over standard, than a low of 19 cm and then a high of 26 cm)
This set it really nice. The lighting is a little moody and dramatic, while not being too far from cozy and naturalistic.
You could imagine a conveniently placed sky-light striking the speaker just so.
the balance bit reminds me of the reasoning behind the fact all the planets in the solar system keep to a certain rhythm relative to each other. they all tug and nudge each other in a way so they stay in perfect everlasting balance.
"they stay in perfect everlasting balance" is an assumption, on your part, not a proved fact. There is evidence that the orbits of planets have changed, significantly, over the history of the solar system.
Long term yes: but on a timescale of billions of years we can't be confident that it will remain stable. The book "Newton's Clock: Chaos in the Solar System" is worth reading on that topic.
@@trueriver1950 Orbits are perfect integrating engines. The tiniest imbalance of influence just keeps accumulating. So what looks perfectly stable, on our observing timescale, if it involves three or more bodies, is almost always, slowly accumulating change.
This video was perfectly timed! I was in Spain on the Mediterranean side last weekend and was wondering why there was no tidal change. Then this video gets recommended, thanks!
Do you think he explained the question? I don't. If the Mediterranean has a relatively constant level - little tidal range - then any water flowing out due to greater density is balanced by water flowing in. That has nothing to do with tides. Tides actually vary greatly around the Atlantic due to variation in near-shore sea depth and shoreline shape, among other factors. So the question is, if the surface water is driven higher in the East Atlantic at the entrance to the Mediterranean, but it doesn't rise an equivalent amount in the immediately adjacent waters of the Western Mediterranean, then why do they balance? I don't see how the evaporation factor has anything to do with it.
The answer is straight up incorrect: Millions of litres of water flow through the straits on a daily basis.
Whilst he got the facts a little wrong, I think he managed to outline the principle: That there are many variables hidden to us laymen that make it a little unintuitive. Evaporation is one of those variables, it's simply not the primary one.
Case in point, it's not that the Gibraltar strait is wide or deep that allows for this appearance of equilibrium but is in fact because it's relatively narrow, which limits the rate at which water flows from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean and vice versa. The difference in salinity mentioned also further exacerbates this bottlenecking of flow.
There is simply not enough time before the tide changes for enough water to have moved in *either* direction to make a particularly noticable difference.
I think the point of evaporation is to cause the two-way flow due to salinity, and Lindy is claiming that that two-way flow causes enough friction to slow the tides.
Personally I think a simpler explanation is that the straights are several miles long, and 20 foot spread over several miles is a very gentle slope.
I agree, he didn’t. The explanation is that the tidal range of the Atlantic Ocean near Gibraltar is only about one meter, which is three feet. This isn’t enough height to cause a dramatic change in the current in the long Gibraltar strait. The depth of the straight would also probably stop a tidal bore from forming even if the tidal range was 6 meters, since the wave propagation speed is so high.
@@robinbennett5994 Not even that much.
At Cadiz, about 65 km (40 mi) north of the straight on the Atlantic side, the tide is only between 0.9 and 3.5 m, about 3-11 ft.
At Tangier, at the western end of of the straight right next to the Atlantic, it's down to 0.7-2.5 m
At Gibraltar, on the eastern end it's 0.2-1.0 m.
At Tunis, halfway through the basin the tides are down to 0.1-0.3 m.
In Alexandria, at the eastern end the highest tide is also about 0.3 m and the lowest is simply skipped. (happens next on 10 Oct, when there is only one high at 1:09 am and and one low at 9:26 am, the next high after that is at 4:16 am the next day. The "afternoon tide" is simply doesn't happen, it's just 18 hours of slow rise) But for the smallest that isn't skipped it's about 5 cm, or about 2 inches.
It's good to see you again!
cool question
Thanks
Loving the dragged-through-a-bush look
These are the lindy videos I love
why isnt there a graphic novel about Hannibal?
"You can lead an elephant over the alps but you can't make him publish a graphic novel." ancient proverb
Haha, nice one!
There is - Ad Astra - Scipio and Hannibal.
Wirhier. Was ist wirhier?
There are. For Lecter.
@Lindeybeige: The tidal current makes a bigger difference than the water level. When the tide is rising, the ocean tries to push you to shore. When the tide is falling the ocean tries to drag you away from the shore.
For modern ships it's a fuel conservation thing, for smaller craft it can keep you from arriving to or leaving the beach against the tide.
P.S. Ididn't believe the old wive's tales, so I got stuck for an extra 2 hours on an island for not checking the tide book. (North Pacific tides, but I was using a 20hp outboard, not a pair of longboat oars)
8:08 why i come here, current events
The mid ocean tidal range is maybe 1m, no where near 8 to 20 feet. Coastal tidal range is due to the interaction with the bottom and the wave riding up on the momentum of the water. That's how Fundi gets such extreme tides.
4:40 it's because Gibraltar is British! And it's simply not allowed!!!
Absolutely correct sir.
🤣🤣🤣
I love the way you explain things! Even if we have different views on certain things, whoever put the work in finding out and understanding the world around us has full right to his or her opinion. You think, and make your audience think with you, and this is amazing. Respect!
Did you say ashphalt?
You my good Sir, definitely march to the beat of your own drum and what a fantastic beat it is. Subscribed!
Also that was a very interesting and entertaining explanation. If only most teachers in schools today, were as passionate and animated as you are, I think we'd be in a far better state, educationally speaking.
The same could be said about the great oceans like the Atlantic and Pacific, why are they not growing bigger with the addition of melting ice, rain, the great and the lesser rivers. Evaporation! The water cycle. We fool ourselves when looking at a map that the Mediterranean is some sort of large lake, it is not. It is a sea! And not some tiny sea like the Irish sea, it is enormous. It is more like a small ocean.
Okay, but sea ice is in balance.
@HappyBeezerStudios that is the point. It is all in balance,
the accent light makes this my favorite youtube dungeon by far. so tasteful
The only thing keeping Lindy’s videos from perfection is the lack of metric system
I'm new here.
Can I assume Lindy's choices in shirt, knitwear and hair are for comic effect?
Rather than indicative of mental health?
@@offshoretomorrow3346 I don’t mind if he is wearing a speedo or a fancy suit. I have to google what fathom are. I think common people from de UK and the US don’t get it right
@@santiagojaviersanchezmohli6771sorry that our refusal to capitulate to the French Cult of Reason and its arbitrary measures causes extra clicks googling.
When one’s sonar goes out, meeting out the depth gauge rope by the fathom is far more intuitive than by the meter.
Screw metric. It’s robotic and soulless
@@santiagojaviersanchezmohli6771 You had to get a little extra learning from your informative video?
This makes understanding evaporation kuch easier to understand, when understanding that the less dense fresh water is constantly being evaporated, whereas what's left is the much denser saltwater. Makes a lot of sense, thanks large in part to Lindy's metaphorical examples, I get descriptive visuals to help me understand this concept.
A fathom?! Back in my day we used to measure in cubits.
Sailors still use fathoms.
I knew about the lack of tidal difference in the Mediterranean Sea, but had never thought about the the tidal flow through the Straits of Gibraltar, nor thought how wide they were. It is this lack of understanding about how very, very big things are that leads to the flat Earthers and they way they can not perceive on a world scale.
If there was 8 to 20 foot tides here in Florida, there wouldn't be a Florida.
You're a great teacher, my friend
The Mediterranean is very big. Years ago I stumbled on a map of land visibility in the Mediterranean and there are large patches where you can't see land in any direction.
Great answer to the question I never knew I needed to know .
It’s worth noting that rivers do not reduce the salinity of a body of water, they’re the reason for its salinity in the first place. Rivers erode minerals from rock beds and soil and deposit them into the seas and oceans. The reason rivers aren’t salty is because they’re moving and there isn’t enough of a concentration of salt to make a difference due to this.
Some facts but wrongly applied.
Yes the salinity comes from the fresh water but when the fresh water meets the sea it is far less saline and so does dilute the salinity of the sea water to some extent.
It is only then the long-term and constant evaporation of the sea water that increases the salinity of the sea.
So it can reduce the salinity and also be the reason/source of the salinity.
@@grolfe3210 thanks for that. Learned somethin’ new.
That WAS true, eons ago, when there was still salts in large quantities to be easily leached. Look at the Baltic Sea, which is only around 12'000 years old. It is a (almost) fresh water lake, with a salinity 5 times less than that of the North Sea, to which it is connected.
I really enjoyed your question and answer. Subscribed!
8 miles? Piffling. Warspite has entered the chat.
This is just pure yappin. But in a good way. No editing and no distractions. Good background video.
Didn't expect Lindy to prove the existence of God in a video about currents through the strait of Gibraltar.
I’m from Valencia, (Spanish Mediterranean area) and the first time I saw the Atlantic wast at 27 y/o and I was IMPRESSED with tides. Like I know how they work, but swing the difference between high and low tides it truly stills blow my mind 🤯
The evaporation of the Mediterranean Sea is so great that IN ADDITION to evaporating all of the rain and the water from the big rivers, if you plug the Gibraltar, the sea level in the Med will drop by 1 meter every year.
No. Even at the equator, water only evaporates at a rate of 200-250mm a MONTH
@@dgoodman1484 1 meter per YEAR is less than 200 mm per MONTH.
@@Tjalve70 To be more precise, about 83.333 mm per month.
@@HappyBeezerStudios That's not more precise. That's exactly the same. And it's so exact that I seriously doubt that it's correct.
Not to mention that if you plug the Gibraltar, the level of the western Mediterranean would drop faster than in the eastern Mediterranean. So making such a prediction would simply not be correct.
@@dgoodman1484 The evaporation of the Mediterranean has been evaluated by several studies. Their results range between 1060 and 1500 mm per year. So, the 1m per year figure of @Tjalve is conservative!
Having sailed around the Aegean and Ionian seas for the best part of 27 years, I can confirm that the the tidal ranges are un-noticeable if not negligible no matter the phase of the moon.
Never heard a believer in creation use the balance of a geophysical system as proof of a creator, so that bit was wasted breath. Otherwise an interesting and worthwhile video.
Yeah that was a bit of a strawman.
Scroll a bit down and you'll find at least two comments saying that the balance leads back to a creator that made the universe exactly so that natural forces will cause stuff to be balanced.
This is fascinating. There are similar, albeit much smaller geographic features all over the Pacific coast of Canada that experience huge tidal flows. You can literally look "up hill" when downstream of these channels.
Yachtsman: The Royal Yachting Association allow certification courses at Gibraltar and Atlantic side but not in the Mediterranean because the tides offer no test of navigation or seamanship.
Thanks for bringing up the tides in old movies. I just bought that and later in school wondered if the tides could really that big in the medi.
That last point. Boy is that hard for some people to fathom. "No grand design. It's there because that was where it settled for thousands and thousands years ago. And was push for it to chance form that equilibrium".
Yup. It must have been "interesting" to be around when the straight first formed. Systems *seeking* equilibrium can oscillate wildly (which is one reason we see many more tornadoes, hurricanes, etc as the planet is adjusting to our absurd emissions).
There is a designer, a designer who uses science and logic to create beautiful things like our earth
@@thehistoadian Aha.... same designer who decided to give infants bone cancer. Get the fuck out.