Life Between the Tides: In Search of Rockpools and Other Adventures Along the Shore

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Zone 3: closed to public; extends around entire tip of peninsula; used as a control area for research; one of the TPERP’s prime missions is to protect Zone 3 Image: Pollution from the Fox Glacier landfill being washed down the Fox River and along the coast, DOC, CC BY 4.0. Every beach has a range of habitats, and different kinds of living things can be found in each habitat

The concepts introduced here are developed further in Building Science Concepts: Tidal communities which explores the overarching concepts for levels 3 and 4. A remarkable and powerful book, the rarest of things … Nicolson is unique as a writer … I loved it’ EDMUND DE WAAL Few places are as familiar as the shore – and few as full of mystery and surprise.The intertidal has been the scene for all kinds of scientific discovery – from the workings of evolution to the intricacies of biological networks. But its story is as much human as natural history: how far should our own lives be understood as an aspect of ecology? Do our buried beliefs about the tidal sea reflect a fundamental understanding of our relationship to nature? And is it the shifting condition of that tidal world, its pervasive uncertainty, its fierce interfolding of opportunity and threat, that makes it one of the most emblematic and revelatory habitats on earth?

The splash zone – the area just above the high-tide line that water doesn’t cover but can get splashed by waves, especially if they are big or at high tide. We stayed the night about ten miles away in a small guest house on the shores of Loch Sunart. A polite atmosphere: cloths on the tables, charming, smiling service at dinner by the man who owned the hotel, a retired biologist, who dipped the end of his tie in the parsnip soup as he set it down in front of us. No one in the dining room said a word. The butter came on silver scallops, the oatcakes were in their own airtight tin and we whispered our secrecies over the venison and the crumble.Intertidal zones are marked by vertical zonation. Different organisms live in different zones in the tidal range, depending on how much water reaches them. This zonation can often be seen vertically, with dry plants near the top of the tidal zone and seaweeds near the bottom. Tidal energy is a renewable resource that many engineers and consumers hope will be developed on a large scale. Now, small programs in Northern Ireland, South Korea, and the U.S. state of Maine are experimenting with harnessing the power of tides. Evocative . . . [Nicolson’s] wonder is infectious, and he makes a convincing case that to better understand the sea, people must pay more attention . . . As poetic as it is enlightening, [ Life Between the Tides ] is tough to put down." — Publishers Weekly

Tides produce some interesting features in the ocean. Tides are also associated with features that have nothing to do with them.Statutory public rights on the shore are thought to include (even if they are not yet enshrined in Scottish law): All the living things that make their homes at the beach rely on that environment for their basic needs – food and shelter.

Geographic imaging systems (GIS) rely on tidal calculations. GIS must account for tides when mapping, especially when mapping the ocean floor. Tides affect the report on an area’s depth. When the sun, moon and Earth are all lined up, the sun’s tidal force works with the moon’s tidal force. The combined pull can cause the highest and lowest tides, called spring tides. Spring tides happen whenever there is a new moon or a full moon and have nothing to do with the season of spring. (The term comes from the German word springen, which means “to jump.”) Did you ever read a book that was quite good for about 75%, but in the last 25% shot itself in the foot? That was this book for me.

The beach environment undergoes not only the diverse regular daily and seasonal changes of conditions but also the unpredictable changes due to extreme weather, unusual tides and the impact of people. Another tidal energy generator uses a type of dam called a barrage (2). A barrage is a low dam where water can spill over the top or through turbines in the dam. Barrages can be constructed across tidal rivers and estuaries. Turbines inside the barrage can harness the power of tides the same way a dam can harness the power of a river. Barrages are more complex designs than single turbines. Nicolson is the supreme poet of the edges—which is where the only interesting and significant things happen. And in Life Between the Tides—a book explicitly about the liminal places where everything is change—his talents are supremely on display. The shore confounds the whole notion of boundaries, and it takes a writer who himself despises and transgresses the traditional boundaries of 'science', 'philosophy', and 'art' to do justice to the shore. Nicolson brings all of himself to the foaming edge of the sea. No one else I know would have the nerve to do that. The result is a subversive, disconcerting triumph; a wondering, wonderful thing." — Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast and Being a Human It is a hymn to the shore, afloat on ‘sea-sorrow’; the king’s body has become something like the floor of the sea. The colours of the shallow-deep waft over him. He is faded-rich. Encrusting jewels enshrine his head and his limbs transmute into submarine treasure. Everything that seems like threat and disaster is conjured here into masque-like glimmer. His corpse is a wonder of the wavering seas. And yet this is a song of death, an obsequy in which the elegance enshrines fatal loss, a drowning, a breaking of human connections, where the body is subject to the violence of the waves, and where sea nymphs ring the funeral bell. It is a place both of salt death and of scarcely imagined perfection. ‘What care these roarers for the name of King?’ the boatswain on their ship had cried as the winds had shrieked about them and now indeed the king has become treasure lying thirty feet down.