Estuaries and Eclipses: Do they affect each other?
Hey guys. Last week my science life went to a whole new level of interesting. I learned about two new very cool phenomenons,estuaries and eclipses (well lunar eclipses). Just some background information. Estuaries are where freshwater from rivers meet salt water. They are usually enclosed on three sides by land. Lunar eclipses are when the moon is right in the earth's umbra (shadow) and the sun is shining on the other side of earth. This gives the moon an orange/red appearance. So my question is: do these two really cool natural phenomenons affect each other at all? I know the moon affects the tides in the ocean so since an estuary is where the salt water of the ocean meets fresh water wouldn't the eclipse of the moon effect somehow the temperature, the depth, or salinity of the water? So i followed my curiosity because i just really wanted to find out. I first started by looking at the temperature, the salinity and the depth of the nearest estuary to us -which is called Waquoit Bay. i checked the data for the temp, the depth, and the salinity of Waquoit Bay the day of the eclipse, the day before that, and two days before the eclipse by going on this really cool website called Estuary education and looking at this graphing tool that monitors the salinity, the depth, the temperature... really EVERYTHING about a estuary. I then looked up when each phase of the eclipse was going on. Using a chart I matched the data for the salinity, the depth and temperature of the water on the SWMP (system wide monitoring program) graphing application to the times when the phases of the eclipse were going on. Based on the data i found the eclipse did'nt affect the water of Waquoit Bay at all. The water's salinity, temp and depth really had no pattern at all. So the answer to my big question is no, the eclipse did not affect the water at all. But here are some pictures of these really cool (but unrelated) phenomenons look like:
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