June 2023 (ROTM#174) La Mision Beach, Baja California, Mexico

It’s time to take a trip to North America, specifically the Pacific coast of Mexico where this fantastic drone picture shows a series of channelised rip currents stacked up along this high energy beach. The obvious rip current is the big dark gap in the foreground opposite the river mouth, but there’s a few more further down the beach as well. All of the rips flow through deeper channels between the shallow sand bars where the waves are breaking. These are big rips and this is a dangerous beach.

Thanks to @Amaia_UABC who I follow on Twitter (or whatever it’s called these days) and although I’ve never met her, she’s a coastal scientist in Mexico and posts lots of great coastal geomorphology images from this coastline – like this one.

Big rips in Mexico - cold water in Baja as well