Geologic Time & Ancient Environments

Tidal Time

Ancient Tides Recorded in Indiana Rocks

by Erik P. Kvale

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Introduction

Ever hold a month of time in your hand? Of course it is impossible, but you can hold a time recording instrument in your hands (like a stopwatch or an hourglass). Did you know that rocks are like stopwatches in that they record time? A block of sandstone records the amount of time it took to deposit and then cement the little sand grains into a sandstone. The problem with "rock stopwatches" is that the face is difficult to read. Typically, it takes much longer to cement the sands than it does to deposit them but exactly how long is not always clear. However, for certain rocks in Indiana we know precisely how long it took to deposit them (down to almost the exact hour). These rocks were deposited by ancient tides when Indiana had a lot of beachfront property and an ocean covering its southwestern corner (no humans, however, just big insects like dragon flies with two-foot wing spans and amphibians large enough to eat them). To understand and fully appreciate these rocks one needs to first understand tides.

An understanding of oceanic tides has been important to human kind ever since people decided that there are good things to eat in the oceans and that oceans make good highways to go from one place to another. But what are ocean tides and how do they form? From a geological point of view and a coastal engineering perspective, tides are also important since they are capable of generating currents that erode, transport, and deposit sediments (or houses or wharfs or ships). This article will try to answer "what are ocean tides and how do they form" and show you that, even in Indiana, tides were once important.

What are tides?

Tides are the rise and fall each day (daily) and sometime twice-a-day (semidaily) of the ocean. For instance, if you were to walk along the shores of the Bay of Fundy in eastern Canada you would not want to go far out on the tidal flat for long. If you walked way out on the tidal flat at low tide in the morning, by late morning or early afternoon you could be under as much as 50 feet of water at high tide if you stayed in one spot. If you could hold your breath for about 6 hours you would once again be on dry (well...damp anyway) ground and able to exhale. Not all coastlines experience that much daily or semidaily rise and fall of tides, but all ocean-facing coastlines have tides.

Did you know that without the sun and moon, the earth would not have noticeable tides? Tides are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon and sun on the earth's oceans. The amount of tidal influence (how high the tide rises each day) along any coastline varies with the positions of those bodies relative to the earth.

In some cases, the high tides will actually deposit a thin layer of sediment on coastal tidal flats. This phenomenom is illustrated in the top animation to the right (click the right-arrow button to play the animation). If the daily or semidaily tidal rise and fall is large enough (the amount of rise and fall is termed "tidal range") thin layers of silt or sand will continue to stack up on each other (think of a stack of poker chips) and actually leave a record of the tidal activity (bottom photograph to the right). Geologists call such deposits tidal rhythmites. If you understand this you are beginning to understand how we can read certain types of "rock stopwatches."

"Tidal Rock Stopwatch"

The thickness of each layer of a tidal rhythmite deposit is determined in a general way by how high the tide rises that day. Thicker layers reflect higher tides and thin layers reflect lower tides. In some cases, tidal rhythmites consist of stacked successions of layers in which successive layers gradually thicken and then thin. This progressive thickening and thinning is in response to the moon and sun changing their positions in the sky relative to our coastal tidal flat.

To understand these changes it is often useful to think in terms of purely astronomical tides and equilibrium tidal theory. By definition, equilibrium tides are ideal and defined by the gravitational forces of the moon, and to a lesser extent the sun, on an idealized earth completely covered by deep water of uniform depth that is capable of instantly responding to changes in tractive forces. Of course our world is not covered by an ocean of uniform depth (otherwise we wouldn't have dry land to stand on), but the model does help us to understand what is going on.

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