Nationwide, every year rip currents cause
about a hundred deaths in the oceans and Great
Lakes. New research doesn’t make the currents any
less dangerous, but, as Charity Nebbe reports, it has
radically changed our understanding of how they work:
Transcript
Nationwide, every year rip currents cause
about a hundred deaths in the oceans and Great
Lakes. New research doesn’t make the currents any
less dangerous, but, as Charity Nebbe reports, it has
radically changed our understanding of how they work:
Rip currents have long been described as underwater rivers flowing out to sea. Using off-
the-shelf Global Positioning System equipment researchers have managed to map rip
currents for the very first time, and as Tim Stanton of the Naval Post Graduate School
explains they found that many of them take a very different course.
“Near shore, there are currents pushing you into the middle of this rip current system and then further
offshore, it tends to bring you all the way along the beach and then back in.”
Unfortunately these fountain-like or circular currents are not the only kind. There are still
the “mega rips,” as Stanton calls them, that do pulse strongly out to sea. He says those
currents are the ones that really put swimmers at risk. He and his team are hoping to
discover what sets those currents apart so they can be more accurately predicted.
For the Environment Report, I’m Charity Nebbe.