The King Tide returned to the Bay Area Saturday morning, leaving their mark on some sidewalks along the Embarcadero.
“At the Golden Gate it was at 10:43 a.m., 7 feet high,” said Lori Lambertson, a staff teacher at the Exploratorium.
Lambertson spent her Saturday morning teaching a group of teachers about the King Tide.
“So these three events come together very close in time to give us our royal tides. We have perigee on Thursday, perihelion in January, and a full moon, which was last night,” she said.
Simply put?
“The sun is a little closer, the moon is a little closer, and we have everything lined up during a full moon,” Lambertson said. “So that’s going to give us this higher than normal high tide.”
King Tides may be a rare phenomenon these days. However, Lambertson says these tidal events provide an important glimpse into the future.
“These high tides give us a glimpse into the future of our normal tides due to sea level rise,” she said. “When sea levels rise a foot higher than they are now, which will happen sometime during this century, the high tide we see today will be the high tide we see every day, and the royal high tide will be the high tide we see every day observe. is higher than that.”
Emma Greenbaum, Climate and Landscapes Project Director at the Exploratorium, was among those present at the event.
“We are in a time of incredible change in our landscape and incredible change in our climate,” she said. “We’ve already made a lot of choices about how we relate to the environment on the coastline. As we move forward, it makes sense to think about this possibility for how we want to live with the landscape, how we might want to live.” making way for water, how we want to live with water, because it’s coming.”
She says the tidal events provide important guidance for making the coastline more resilient and protecting critical infrastructure from sea level rise.
“A lot of these things that we all rely on to keep the region going are vulnerable to sea level rise,” Lambertson said. “We have an incredible opportunity to reshape the coastline of San Francisco and across the Bay.”
Another tidal event is expected to occur in mid-December.
If you have taken photos of the King Tide, please send them to the California King Tides Project.
