You may have heard a lot of talk about king tides. But what are they exactly?

Well in this Virtually Rick we’re going to take a dip into what they are and what they do.

First Up: Tides.

It never ceases to amaze me that this is how they work: Here’s the moon and the Earth.

The moon may look fairly docile, but actually it’s very powerful. The moon like the earth has a gravitational pull. Anything that weighs something, has mass, has pulling power, gravity if you will.

So the bigger the mass, the bigger the pull. The moon is roughly a quarter the size of the earth and the reason we don’t fly off the earth’s surface is because of the gravity, it pulls us down.

I’m going to really simplify this. The moon's own gravity is the driving force of the tides -- the sun helps too, but let’s just make this a moon party.

So the moon’s force pulls the oceans upwards creating high tides in the areas which face the moon, and low tides in the areas that don’t. You have land in the way so that impacts where the water can flow. This happens twice a day.

So what then is a king tide?

It’s something that happens only a few times a year when something celestial goes down. When the Earth, sun and moon align, the perfect example being the Super Blood Wolf Moon, which was a rare lunar eclipse, blocking direct sunlight and making it pass through the Earth’s atmosphere to create dramatic lighting on the moon.

When there’s an alignment of all three in a line, starting with the sun, then the moon, then the earth, when the moon and alignment is closest to Earth, what they call perigee, and the Earth gets super close to the moon but the closest it also gets to the sun  – called the perihelion.

Then the sun, followed by the moon, the all pull together and create a sort of gravitational tractor beam, a really strong pull on our ocean.

So it’s basically a mega tide, perhaps called a king because it’s a ROYAL PAIN! And if king tides happen during storms or floods they can be just that…

But why should we care?

According to NOAA, the government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, nearly 200,000 Californians are at risk in low-lying coastal areas lower than one foot below sea level, and there are 873 miles of coastal roads that are vulnerable to storm surges and king tides.

Look what happens if in the future the sea level rises by a few feet incrementally. It could potentially hit our coastal regions hard. As NOAA reports, coastal tourism accounts for 39 percent of California’s $17.6 billion coastal economy.

Floods could also interfere with transport to jobs accounting for $662 billion in wages. Ugh . . .

The king tides will serve as future echoes to ready us for the rough seas ahead, and if these royal tides are anything to go by, it’s going to be anything but smooth sailing. Because, if sea levels continue to rise, we might very well be in over our head.