The (Bristol) tide machines: the role of machines in understanding, monitoring, and predicting the complex tidal rhythms of the earth's oceans for scientific, political and commercial purposes

TL;DRAbstract

Tides are fundamental and extraordinarily powerful forces which wash across the earth's oceans, having particularly marked effects in various coastal locations. Their poly-rhythmic flow and ebb - repeatedly inundating and revealing areas of intertidal terrain - has been critical to the evolution of life itself, to hunter-gather, agrarian, trading and industrial (coastal) communities. Tides affect coastal topography, sea navigation and terrestrial journeys, conquest and defence, urban and rural land use. They pose challenges to coastal management, flood protection, resource extraction, landscape/ecology conservation, and provide key ecological, recreational commercial assets through ecosystem services. Although the basics of tidal science developed rapidly after Newton's revelation of the forces of gravity and planetary motion, tides are dauntingly complex in process detail, and in detail of spatio-temporal variation due to interacting factors, such as prevailing atmospheric conditions,

Chat with Paper

AI Agents for this Paper