August 2025 (ROTM#200) Somewhere in North Korea (really)

Can you see any North Koreans?

I can think of no better way to celebrate the 200th Rip of the Month Anniversary than to show you a picture of rip currents from North Korea! I bet you didn’t know that North Korea had beaches, let alone rip currents - not that anybody really knows anything about North Korea. But it’s interesting that rips occur in so many different places!

I am not exactly sure where in North Korea this image came from, but it was sourced off of Google Earth Pro by a PhD student Anmol Goyal from the UNSW Water Research Laboratory who I am co-supervising. Anmol is looking at the ability of using AI and Machine Learning to identify rip currents from satellite images and is looking for the classic ‘dark gap’ channelised rip currents as shown in this picture….there are 4 of them. He’s picked a number of locations to find his images and given he has to look for thousands of them, why not look at North Korea?

I have no idea if there are lifeguards on North Korean beaches, or if there is any rip current safety, or if anyone actually swims in North Korea! But take a trip on Google Earth sometime and check out the North Korean coastline, it looks quite beautiful.