To me there's never been a more exciting or dramatic concept than the idea that in the

early days of planet Earth, when the moon was much closer and orbited much faster and exerted

much greater tidal forces, that catastrophic oceanic tidal waves, kilometers high, circled

the planet at thousands of kilometers per hour, destroying everything in their path,

multiple times every single day. Prehistoric supersonic monster tides is coming up right now,

unskeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. Prehistoric supersonic monster tides.

It's a fact in the early days of Earth when the moon was newly formed. The two bodies were

much closer and orbited each other much faster, spinning like ice dancers pulled tight. Gradually

they've been slowing and pulling farther apart, leading to the distance we measure today,

and the relatively mellow tides we enjoy. The moon's gravity is what drives the tides on Earth,

so you may have heard, either on television or the internet, or your other pop culture,

data-spigot of choice, that in those earliest days, the tides were enormous, manifesting as a

titanic wall of crashing white water, kilometers high, an endless sweep of destruction, roaring across

the continents at supersonic speeds, obliterating everything every few hours. It's an image that puts

anything in Dante's inferno to shame. It's an image of such intensity, such drama, that you may wonder

if such cataclysmic violence was actually possible and actually real. Today we're going to deconstruct the

components of this geologic and oceanographic melee, and see if we can determine just what the

real conditions were, in comparison to this popularly depicted cataclysm. Let's go back in time,

some four and a half billion years ago. Earth and the other planets coalesced from the dust of

which the solar system was formed. The ejected material left over when a previous dying star exploded.

Gravity and angular momentum drew this material together into a rotating disc, which gradually

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