The tides are strong and getting stronger Jeff Hornbaker / Plainpicture
Right now ocean tides are big and the next few million years will see them becoming bigger.
That’s because our scattered continents are surrounded by ocean basins that are just the right size to make really powerful tides. In contrast, whenever all Earth’s continents clump together into a single supercontinent, the tides go limp.
For the last 3 billion years, Earth’s continents have been conducting a stately dance. Roughly every 400 to 500 million years they cluster together into one giant supercontinent, before fragmenting again. The last supercontinent…
