It’s hard to imagine the volume of water in the 10- to-13-foot tides that we regularly have in Naskeag Harbor, but here’s a way to try: Find the dark high tide band on the granite ledge in this image and cover that band and everything below it with a piece of paper (preferably green or blue), which represents water.
Theoretically, you have just replicated the Harbor’s high tide and drowned this photographer and the innocent sea glass hunter on the sand bar. Your next exercise is to use this image to try to imagine the volume in the world’s biggest tides, up the coast in Canada’s Bay of Fundy, where they’re about four times higher than ours – beyond 53 feet (16.3 meters). (Brooklin, Maine)