Throughout this unit, we learned about tides, their causes and what influences them. In preparing for this blogpost, I came across two different kinds of tides (besides high and low tide) called “spring” and “neap” tides. These tides correlate with the moon phases, in that spring tides occur during the new or full moon, and the neap tides 7 days after the spring tides.
Spring tides are more extreme in their difference between high and low tide. This occurs when the Sun, Moon, and Earth are more or less aligned, and thus the gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon are “added”, creating higher high tides and lower low tides. Neap tides refers to when the Sun and Moon are at right angles to each other, canceling out each others pull a little bit, creating a lower high tide and a higher low tide; the tides are less extreme in their differences between each other.
Katelyn Mofield's ASTR 2110-01 Blog 