Rip Spotting Ability Worse Than We Thought

An instalment of Rob’s Rip Research Reviews…

There’s been a bit of a lull in rip current research lately, but an exciting new study led by Sebastian Pitman of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand was recently published in the Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences. Seb is one of the young researchers out there studying rips and led a study at New Zealand’s Muriwai Beach to examine beachgoers’ ability to identify rip currents. Seb and his team went one step further than the traditional approach of showing people static pictures of rips, which has its' limitations - they used real rips! They found that while most beachgoers couldn’t identify rips in pictures, even those that could weren’t very good at spotting an actual rip on the beach.  This suggests that beachgoer rip spotting ability is even worse than we previously thought – not good.

This summer, UNSW BSRG research internship student Lea Uebelhoer will be extending Sebastian’s work on beaches on the south coast of New South Wales (with help from Seb) and we are also keen to conduct a dedicated project in future to test various approaches to educating the public on rip current recognition. Stay tuned for updates on these projects and get in touch if you’d like to know more or be involved!

By the way, Muriwai is a seriously intense high-energy beach. We did a rip experiment there in the late 90’s, but a more interesting read may be the story behind it. Thanks to Professor Andy Short for the image of Muriwai taken during our experiment, which shows a massive rip current heading at least 300 m offshore.

-Rob