# If the moon wasn't receding from Earth, what would be the impact on the weather and tides?

Moon is slowly receding from Earth, which means that after its formation it was much closer to the Earth than now. How would weather look like if it wasn't receding at it would be now as close as at the beginning?

Surely, the tides would be much higher, but how big would be the difference? I've also watched document stating that the hurricanes would be much stronger. Was there any simulations, how much stronger they would be?

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An interesting BBC snippet about this youtube.com/watch?v=XR0N4XKwgHM – user8 Sep 28 '13 at 2:33

Tidal amplitudes roughly scale inversely with distance to the fourth power (this comes from the tidal force scaling as $r^{-3}$ and the Earth's potential scaling as $r^{-1}$). At its formation, the Moon was approximately seven Earth radii away from Earth, or about ten times closer than it is today. Thus, the amplitude of the tide on Earth would have been approximately $10^4$ times larger than it is today. As the typical ocean tide is 1 m, this means ocean tides would have been 10 km high on Earth! Of course, the collision that formed the moon turned the surface of the Earth molten, so really we're talking about a 10 km tall molten tide, which is far less scary...(kidding).