This week’s king tides may be giving us a glimpse of the future. But scientists say, don’t look for something dramatically different. Sea level rise, although very important, is a subtle thing.

Cue the fanfare: the king tides – the highest and lowest tides of the year – return to Monterey Sunday and Monday and again on Dec. 13, 14, and 15, when they’ll reach their peak highs and lows.

The California King Tides Project is asking the community to get involved by taking photos of what they see and thinking about how their communities may be impacted by the rising sea.

The Moss Landing Harbor during the low tide during king tides in 2014.(Monterey Herald archives) 

King tides “give us this perfect opportunity to see what’s vulnerable now to flooding, and what’s going to be vulnerable every day when we see this amount of sea level rise,” said Annie Kohut Frankel, the California Coastal Commission’s grants and education coordinator. “It’s fun and it’s a natural phenomenon that can be really cool to see, particularly if we happen to have a corresponding offshore storm that can make the king tides very dramatic.”

That being said, “it’s fun to go out and look in certain places,” said Gary Griggs, who studies coastal erosion and sea-level rise at UC Santa Cruz, “but people shouldn’t expect a tsunami coming in.”

King tides occur when the Earth, moon and sun align at their closest points to each other. All tides depend on the gravitational pull of celestial bodies – mostly the moon, and to some extent the sun. Because the moon orbits Earth in an ellipse, like an oval, its distance from the Earth is constantly changing. When the moon is closer to Earth, its gravitational pull is stronger and the tides bigger. It’s the same story for Earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun; the closer things are together, the stronger the gravitational pull between them will be.

When the Earth, moon, and sun align in their orbits at their closest points to each other, the gravitational pull of the sun on the sea is added to the moon’s, pulling the oceans even more and creating the highest and correspondingly lowest tides of the year. These are called king tides, which will come up on the coast several inches higher than normal.

A measuring stick in the Moss Landing Harbor in 2014 during king tides. (Monterey Herald archives) 

“Now, I think the sense is, oh, gosh, we’re going to get 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 more feet of tides,” explained Griggs, but in reality, the increase is only “a few tenths of a foot – they’re basically the highest tides of the year. But depending on the slope of the shoreline versus the rocky cliff, that can go further inland.”

In Monterey County, the best places to see the high king tides are Elkhorn Slough and Del Monte Beach which are close to sea level and slope gradually into the ocean. Along with the extreme highs will be extreme lows, so the king tides are also a great time to go tide pooling, recommended Frankel. Monterey Bay Aquarium has tide pooling tips and guidelines (https://ift.tt/38DSENI) for how to respectfully pay a visit to our sea creature friends.

Places such as Point Lobos State Natural Reserve should have accessible tidepools. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday will be the best days to go out and see the king tides in daylight. To submit photos to the California King Tides project, visit  https://www.coastal.ca.gov/kingtides/.