Water waves - what are they?

The Moon "draws" the water toward it. This causes the tides, whether it be neap or high tides.

As the water is "drawn", it will do so but the water will never REACH THE MOON! It's impossible! The Moons GRAVITY isn't strong enough for that to happen, this is the KEY point!

The Sun deserves a mention too! Technically it has a similar effect on the tides, if the Moon and the Sun are facing the same side of the Earth as each other, this causes high SPRING tides, if they are on opposite sides, again we can get high SPRING tides. If they are in any other position, we call that NEAP tides.

The Sun is 400 times further away from the Earth than the Moon is BUT the Sun is 400 times BIGGER than the Moon. Gravity is all about MASS, the BIGGER or the more DENSE the the MASS is, the greater its GRAVITATIONAL PULL. Distance has to be taken into account though aswell. Hopefully this paragraph explains the EQUAL (distance and size) effect of the Sun and Moon on our oceans.

Back to waves! You could say that water waves have a SHAPE, think of a CANDLE, when lit, the flame is shaped by GRAVITY! It's like a deformed triangle, it has a TIP! So do WAVES! It's just that you can't see it because the waves are so wide, the tip is unnoticeable. There'll always be a LEADING part of the WAVE and that's the TIP!

Due to the fact that the WAVE cannot reach the Moon or Sun because of the WEAKNESS of GRAVITY, the WAVE literally collapses. The collapse normally occurs on the shoreline because there's no MORE WATER to be apart of the wave. The COLLAPSE can also occur out at sea because the wave loses MOMENTUM (again GRAVITY). Waves follow each other as the PULL of the Moon and Sun on the oceans is CONTINUOUS.

Thanks for reading! Hope you get something out of it, I certainly enjoy writing this stuff :-)

Adam X