Where can you walk from land to a place farthest from land that is still in, say, 4 feet or less of water? Doesn’t matter if it is permanent or tide-dependent, it only matters how deep the waters are at the time you’re wading.
I used to live in Panama. On the Pacific coast the tides are fairly large and the shore is very flat in many areas. We used to beach around here: Google Maps. It was not uncommon to walk out half a mile.
I’m not suggesting this is the world’s greatest distance, but it’s probably a decent start.
The tricky part, and where I may not have answered the question you asked, is that this was when the tide was out and the sand/mud flat was exposed to the air. When the tide was fully in, most of this was in 5-10 feet of water. There certainly was an intermediate time between high and low tide when the whole flat was in 2 to 4 feet of water. But that was a pretty transitory condition. Every couple of months some goofball would take an SUV out there, get stuck, and watch it disappear completely under the sea within 4 hours or so. Oops.
I’ll offer Turnagain Arm, Alaska. It has the largest tides in North America and the mud flats at low tide go out for more than quite a ways.
The Laguna Madre in south Texas is quite shallow, averaging about 3 feet deep, and could be crossed on foot before a waterway was dredged for shipping. It’s widest point is about six miles, so you can wade out about 3 miles at the widest point.
TheSyvash is an extremely shallow swampy sea next to the Sea of Azov. It covers almost 3,000 sq kms, and almost all of it between 0.5-1 metre deep. It’s maximum width is about 50 kms, while it is about 150 kms long. The deepest point anywhere is barely 3 metres.
It is known as the Rotten sea because of the smell of decomposing vegetation in the mud.
Probably somewhere in Adam’s Bridge, aka Rama’s Bridge. Depending on your defitions. Do you count the dry sand on sand banks as land ??
Its sand spit or ismuth formation , from India to Sri Lanka
I always thought the highest tides in the world were in the Bay of Fundy, between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada.
There are a few places where it is possible to walk out onto mud and sand when the tide is low and be out of sight of land. The tide goes out for several miles. It can be quite disorientating, especially if there is a sea mist. Such places can be deadly because the land is never completely flat, there are channels and you can find yourself isolated on a sand bank with deep water in every direction.
The UK has some very high tidal ranges and there are areas where rivers flow into wide bays and create a coastal landscape dominated by tidal mud flats that extend for many miles. At some times of year there are also tidal waves, only a few are large, but they are enough to cause a tragedy if you are caught several miles from the shore.
There are a lot of factors that determine how far the tide goes out: time of year, time of day, the air pressure, the coastal landscape, the weather. I guess the furthest would persist for only when all of these factors coincide and it may only be for minutes. Whether you can wade back again to safety before you are engulfed by the tide, that is another matter.
A more certain answer would probably be from an enclosed body of water unaffected by tides.
How about 15 km? Mont Saint Michel.
So you are a Fundy mentalist?
I may have the details wrong, but I recall a passage in Erik Larsen’s “Isaac’s Storm” describing an experience by Isaac Cline’s brother Joseph during a severe blue norther to hit south Texas (supposedly the wind was so intense that it blew water out of the arm of a bay between Galveston and the Texas mainland, allowing him to wade a channel normally traversed by ocean-going ships).
Second highest tides in North America after the Bay of Fundy.
A very, very similar thread from earlier this year.
This thread reminds me of one of George Carlin’s news headlines.
“A man who was attempting to walk completely around the world drowned today.”
There is a run, called the “Not Since Moses” run where you can run on the ocean floor in Nova Scotia - yep Bay of Fundy
St Michel is a magical place, also known as Dragonstone Castle in The Game of Thrones.
Here is the view from a drone (or a dragon) during the exceptional low tide of 2015.
They are the highest in the US, but the Bay of Fundy has the highest in the world, up to 53 ft. See Bay of Fundy Tides: The Highest Tides in the World!.
I don’t know how far you can walk at low tide around Mont St. Michel in Normandy but the flood tide is said to be faster than a galloping horse, which suggests that it is running over some very flat ground.
Interesting inputs so far. I was looking for the previous thread but couldn’t find it, and at any rate there are some new candidates. I’d say that temporary location counts even if you cannot safely walk back, but I am on the fence as to whether sandbars count, depending on how water-logged they are.
In the previous thread I was thinking about offering Lake Eyre which when it appears, is on average 5 feet deep and 3668 square miles in area, but I wasn’t sure how much of it was more than 4 feet deep and thus was not walkable into.