I am about going to the beach, and a lot of people are warning me to watch out for rip currents, but I don’t know why they occur or why they are so dangerous.
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Basically, there’s a sandbar out from the beach itself, which creates a sort of lagoon. Waves crash over the sandbar, and overfill the lagoon. The extra water blows a hole in the sandbar and rushes back out to sea.
The currents are dangerous because they’re hard to spot, and very strong. People who get caught in them realise they’re being washed out to sea and panic, trying to swim back to shore. It’s effectively impossible to beat the current so they get exhausted and drown.
The key to surviving a rip, if you’re caught in one, is to either allow yourself to be carried all the way out (a few hundred metres at most) and then swim back (avoiding the rip) or to swim parallel to the shore, as rip currents are very narrow (maybe ten or twenty metres) and once you’re free of it you can swim back to shore.
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