Return of King Tide to Bay Area provides glimpse into future, expert says
The King Tide made its return to the Bay Area on Saturday morning, leaving its mark on some of the sidewalks along the Embarcadero.
"At the Golden Gate, it was at 10:43 a.m., at 7 feet," said Lori Lambertson, a staff educator with the Exploratorium.
Lambertson spent her Saturday morning teaching a group of teachers about the King Tide.
"So we have these three events coming together very close in time to give us our royal tides. We have perigee on Thursday, perihelion in January, and a full moon, which was last night," she said.
Simply put?
"The sun is a little closer, the moon is a little closer, and we have everything lined up during a full moon," Lambertson said. "So, that's going to give us these higher-than-normal high tides."
King Tides may be a rare phenomenon today. However, Lambertson says these tidal events provide an important glimpse into the future.
"These high tides are giving us a glimpse into the future of our normal tides because of sea level rise," she said. "When sea levels are a foot higher than they are now, which will happen sometime during this century, this high tide that we're observing today will be the high tide that we observe every day, and the royal tide will be the one that is higher than that."
Emma Greenbaum, the project director for Climate and Landscapes at the Exploratorium, was one of the people there for the event.
"We are at a time of incredible change with our landscape and an incredible change with our climate," she said. "We've made a lot of choices already as to how we relate to the environment on the shoreline. As we move forward, it makes sense to think about this opportunity for how we want to live with the landscape, how we want to maybe make way for water, how we want to live with water, because it's coming."
She says the tidal events provide important guidance for how to make the coastline more resilient and how to protect critical infrastructure from sea level rise.
"A lot of these things that we all rely on to keep the region going are vulnerable to sea level rise," Lambertson said. "We have an incredible opportunity to reimagine the shoreline in San Francisco and across the Bay."
Another tidal event is expected to occur in mid-December.
If you took any photos of the King Tide, you can send them to the California King Tides Project.
