Sheryl Jewell, age 9, of Spokane, Washington,. for her question:

Where does the water go at low tide?

The world is a big round ball, but we see only a small piece of it and this seems to be flat. We cannot see that the great oceans reach all the way around the globe. But they do. Suppose we put some of this water in a flat bowl and tilted it from side to side. The water would rise up on one side and down on the other side, back and forth. Something like this happens at high and low tide. Though naturally the big global picture is a lot more complicated.

The waters of the huge ocean tip up and down, somewhat like water tipping from side to side in a bowl. When the tide sinks down on your favorite beach, a high tide rises on other far away beaches. When we get a low tide, so do the people on the opposite side of the world. The water we lose piles up in high tides, halfway between us and opposite low tides. And all the time, these high tides and low tides chase each other around and around the globe.