Why are people swept away by rip tides never found sometimes ? Does the body sink to the bottom of the ocean once the person drown?
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Almost all the water near a beach is constantly being pushed up against the sand, it looks like simple waves to us, but there is the force of millions and millions and millions of miles of ocean water behind those waves.
A combination of terrain, gravity, inertia, and other physics factors can combine to create areas where those billions of gallons of water are rapidly rushing back out to sea, in the opposite direction of the waves. These are rip tides, and they can easily be dozens of yards/meters wide.
It actually is possible to safely escape a rip tide, but it requires two things: storng swimming ability, and knowing how to escape a rip tide.
A rip tide will not drag you under, but it will be pulling you out into the ocean at a minimum 60 ft per minute, up to maybe even 500ft per minute. ((20-150m per minute)). You have zero chance of counter acting that force of nature head on, you need to swim parallel to the shore while letting it push you out to sea, until you successfully exit the rip tide area and return to regular waters. Assuming there are no life guard aids coming to meet you, you now must swim back to shore.
This is totally doable, but again only if you are a fit swimmer and know that you should do it without panicking. Open water swimming is a sport in the same category as mountain climbing or hiking etc. You need to have a basic ability to care for yourself if things go awry, because if you do it enough they eventually will.
In general I would say you should not leave the shoreline if you cannot at absolute minimum swim a mile in under an hour, and at minimum tread water for two hours. These aren’t crazy athletic feats, but people who get swept away by riptides are people without these minimum levels of fitness– or in waters requiring higher levels of fitness//swimming ability.
As for never being seen again, thats extremely unlikely in the literal sense. Riptides can continue for hundreds to maybe thousands of feet in some unique terrain//weather….. but probably not more than a half mile//1km. That is totally a range where any poor unfortunate soul would likely roll back up on the beach within a day or two.
So why do some people genuinely go missing forever? This is again a feature of people going open water swimming who aren’t prepared for the extreme sport rather than any feature of rip tides themselves. It happens for the same reason people go missing forever when camping, or hiking, or mountain climbing– not telling people exactly where you are going and and when you plan to be back. Going ro places not sanctioned as safe for that activity. Whether its a mountain or an ocean, things can look like deceptively easy terrain while being the most lethal.
PS– this is all about rip tides. Especially if you are doing the last thing I mentioned and swimming in unsafe open waters, its totally possible to get caught in a downdraft, swept into an underwater cave, or smashed into a cliff of rocks or coral. These are all potentially survivable, but if you are not in full open waters scuba gear your chances of survival– or surfacing in any recognizable way, are slim.
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