[SunkenCiv]

It’s not the ocean tides, it’s the tidal transfer of momentum — a body in prograde motion around a parent body loses rotational momentum as it pushes away, and vice versa. If the Earth had no oceans this would all still be going on.

The Earth has roughly 100 times the mass of the Moon, and the Moon has given up rotation first. The Moon obviously rotates of course, otherwise we wouldn’t see the same face all the time.

The Sun and Earth are similarly pushing away from each other.

Also the Earth’s tides are one third the product of the Sun’s gravity, despite the greater distance compared with the Moon.

[dayglored]

> It’s not the ocean tides, it’s the tidal transfer of momentum — a body in prograde motion around a parent body loses rotational momentum as it pushes away, and vice versa. If the Earth had no oceans this would all still be going on.

Hmmm. Maybe I need to crack open my ancient orbital dynamics textbook (50 years ago I earned a BS in Physics but then went into system engineering and IT instead)... It's probably hidden under the partial diff-eq and lin-algebra textbooks, LOL.