Quote:
Originally Posted by ckissick
I'm a geologist. I'll take this one.
Over the billions of years that the earth and moon have been around, a stable "tidal wave" has developed.
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I'm a physicist, and as much as I hate to say it...you're wrong. Sorry.
The term "tidal" and "tide" come from gravitational tidal forces. Any gravitational source puts several different stresses on any other object...it doesn't just pull it.
One of the forces is a squeezing in the transverse direction. Another is a lengthening in the radial direction. These two force together cause the ocean to form an oval (more properly, and ellipse) around the Earth (which is also being squeezed and lengthened into an ellipse, but on a MUCH smaller scale).
The math behind it is pretty complex, but the result is well understood. It's not because of an ancient stable tidal wave traveling around the planet.