The Moon's Hidden Influence

The Moon's Hidden Influence: The Moon's gravity drives Earth's ocean tides, slows our planet's spin and times the breeding of countless sea creatures, while popular beliefs about full moons causing madness, crime and bumper crops have mostly failed scientific testing.

Bay of Fundy: Canada's Bay of Fundy has the highest tides on Earth, with a range that can top 50 feet, because the bay's shape resonates almost perfectly with the Moon's tidal rhythm.

Galileo Galilei: In his 1632 Dialogue he wrongly blamed tides on Earth's motion and dismissed Kepler's idea that the Moon pulled the seas as belief in occult forces.

Great Barrier Reef: Its corals release trillions of eggs and sperm in a synchronized mass spawning a few nights after certain late spring full moons, cued by moonlight and water temperature.

Palolo Worm: In Samoa these reef worms release their reproductive tails on predictable nights after the October and November moons, and islanders time feasts to scoop them from the sea.

California Grunion: These small fish ride waves onto beaches to spawn only on the nights after full and new moons, burying eggs in sand that the next big tides will wash out.

Marie Dacke: The Swedish biologist showed that African dung beetles steer their balls in straight lines using polarized moonlight, the first animal known to navigate this way.

Christmas Island Red Crab: Tens of millions of crabs march from the forest to the sea, and females release their eggs at the turn of the high tide around the Moon's last quarter.

Apollo 11 Retroreflector: Lasers bounced off the mirror panel astronauts left in 1969 reveal the Moon is drifting away from Earth by about 1.5 inches a year.

John W. Wells: In 1963 he counted daily growth lines in fossil corals and found Devonian years had about 400 days, proof the Moon's tidal braking has been slowing Earth's spin for hundreds of millions of years.

Christian Cajochen: His 2013 sleep lab study found people took about 5 minutes longer to fall asleep and slept about 20 minutes less around the full moon, even with no view of the sky.

Leandro Casiraghi: His 2021 study found both Indigenous Toba communities in Argentina and Seattle college students went to bed later and slept less in the nights leading up to a full moon.

Arnold Lieber: His 1978 book The Lunar Effect claimed the Moon pulls on the water in our bodies, but a review of 37 studies by James Rotton and Ivan Kelly found no link between moon phase and behavior.

Charlotte Helfrich-Forster: Her 2021 analysis of long term cycle records found women's menstrual cycles intermittently synchronized with the Moon's phases, a link that weakened with age and artificial light.

Maria Thun: The German farmer's biodynamic sowing calendar, first published in 1963, times planting by the Moon's position in the zodiac and is still followed by some famous vineyards, despite little evidence it works.

Old Farmer's Almanac: Founded by Robert B. Thomas in 1792, it has printed moon based planting guidance for more than two centuries and remains North America's oldest continuously published periodical.

Harvest Moon: Around the autumn equinox the full moon rises only a short time later each night instead of the usual 50 minutes, giving farmers extra hours of evening light to bring in crops.

Callanish Stones: Researchers believe this Scottish stone circle was aligned to the major lunar standstill, when the Moon skims unusually low along the hills once every 18.6 years.

Gervase of Tilbury: His early 1200s book Otia Imperialia is often cited as one of the first texts to tie men turning into wolves to the cycles of the Moon.

Sussex Police: In 2007 officers in Brighton added patrols on full moon nights after an inspector said he had seen violent incidents rise, reviving an old belief most large studies have not supported.

Kim Last: His 2016 research showed that during the months long Arctic polar night, tiny zooplankton migrate up and down the water column by moonlight instead of sunlight.

Craig Packer: His research in Tanzania found lion attacks on people were most frequent in the dark nights just after the full moon, when lions are hungriest and people are still out after sunset.

Satoshi Ide: His 2016 study found very large earthquakes were somewhat more likely to strike when tidal stress from the Moon and Sun was at its peak.

Qiantang River: Its tidal bore, a wall of water rushing upstream that can reach several meters high, peaks around the autumn full moon and has drawn crowds of watchers for more than a thousand years.

Lunar Society of Birmingham: Thinkers like James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin met on the Monday nearest the full moon so they had enough light to ride home safely after dinner.