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. Explore the science concepts that underpin knowledge and understanding about life between the tides.

In the period between the two spring tides, the moon faces the Earth at a right angle to the sun. When this happens, the pull of the sun and the moon are weak. This causes tides that are lower than usual. These tides are known as neap tides. The New Zealand Ministry of Education’s Building Science Concepts (BSC) series presents sets of interlinking concepts that build stage by stage towards overarching science concepts or big ideas. A big idea shows how a fully developed understanding of the concept might look but recognises that such an understanding might not be achieved until New Zealand Curriculum level 7 or 8. In most tidal energy generators, turbines are put in tidal streams (1). A turbine is a machine that takes energy from a flow of fluid. That fluid can be air ( wind) or liquid (water). Because water is more dense than air, tidal energy is more powerful than wind energy. Placing turbines in tidal streams can be difficult, because the machine disrupts the tide it is trying to harness. However, once the turbines are in place, tidal energy is predictable and stable. The plants of the intertidal zone must also deal with wave action. Brown kelp and sea tulips have flexible, leathery bodies with tough attachments to avoid being damaged by breaking waves, while pipi, tuatua and toheroa avoid wave action by burrowing into the sand or mud. Nicolson] succeeds gloriously in conveying the marvels of a stretch of Scottish tidal coast, mixing history, science, and precise descriptions bright with inventive metaphors and profound revelations.A lot more about life within the rhythm of sea and tides rather than what's happening amidst the tidal pools that the author created in the bay near his Scots summer residence.

How do sandhoppers inherit an inbuilt compass from their parents? What is it that prawns know? How do crabs understand the tides? How can the death of one winkle guarantee the lives of its companions? But there is a great deal more on the human evaluation - the history of the people that lived along the bay and made their living - or tried to - from the sea. From the Mesolithic to the present. As sacrifice, survival and beliefs tried to help their endurance of devastating conditions - abject poverty, hunger, and determination to more than exist. 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.”)

This unmeasurability means that the Mandelbrot world is a set of dizzying spirals. The closer you look, the deeper it dives. Any examination of anything becomes an ever-growing, ever-inward plunge into the indefinable. The slower you go, the more there is to your journey. Pause for a moment and a place will pool out around you, not as an illusion but as a fact, in details it would not have had if you had not stopped to look. 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. Descending the slopes of Cabrillo National Monument, sandstone cliffs drop off into the intertidal habitat that characterizes the western shore of the monument. The intertidal zone is where the land and sea merge.

In this context,' Fossat wrote in Science, 'the crayfish represents a new model that might provide insights into the mechanisms underlying anxiety that have been conserved during evolution. Our results also emphasize the ability of an invertebrate to exhibit a state that is similar to a mammalian emotion but which likely arose early during the evolution of metazoans. Image: Ngarimu Bay, Anne Barker. There are various kinds of beaches, and the way they look is constantly changing 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?

New Zealand beaches include a variety of distinct habitats, each supporting a wide range of living things. All beaches share several characteristics: Surf grass is the only true plant within the Intertidal Zone. All the other “plants” are algae, commonly referred to as seaweed. Algae are neither plant nor animal. 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. Marine Metre Squared is a New Zealand citizen science project that supports communities to monitor their local seashore. Above the high-tide line – the land beyond the highest point that the tide reaches in normal conditions.