ice for about four months every year while the Bay of Fundy rarely freezes. Southampton in the United Kingdom has a double high water caused by the interaction between the M2 and M4 tidal constituents (Shallow water overtides of principal lunar). Portland has double low waters for the same reason. The M4 tide is found all along the south coast of the United Kingdom, but its effect is most noticeable between the Isle of Wight and Portland because the M2 tide is lowest in this region. Because the oscillation modes of the Mediterranean Sea and the Baltic Sea do not coincide with any significant astronomical forcing period, the largest tides are close to their narrow connections with the Atlantic Ocean. Extremely small tides also occur for the same reason in the Gulf of Mexico and Sea of Japan. Elsewhere, as along the southern coast of Australia, low tides can be due to the presence of a nearby amphidrome. Analysis Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation first enabled an explanation of why there were generally two tides a day, not one, and offered hope for a detailed understanding of tidal forces and behavior. Although it may seem that tides could be predicted via a sufficiently detailed knowledge of instantaneous astronomical forcings, the actual tide at a given location is determined by astronomical forces accumulated by the body of water over many days. In addition, accurate results would require detailed knowledge of the shape of all the ocean basins—their bathymetry, and coastline shape. Current procedure for analysing tides follows the method of harmonic analysis introduced in the 1860s by William Thomson. It is based on the principle that the astronomical theories of the motions of Sun and Moon determine a large number of component frequencies, and at each frequency there is a component of force tending to produce tidal motion, but that at each place of interest on the Earth, the tides respond at each frequency with an amplitude and phase peculiar to that locality. At each place of interest, the tide heights are therefore measured for a period of time sufficiently long (usually more than a year in the case of a new port not previously studied) to enable the response at each significant tide-generating frequency to be distinguished by analysis, and to extract the tidal constants for a sufficient number of the strongest known components of the astronomical tidal forces to