These channelised rips are very common on our beaches and tend to look like narrow, dark green paths through the whitewater – think ‘white is nice, green is mean’. But they are only one type of rip which makes rip spotting tricky.

Have you ever set up your towel on the beach, nice and high and dry, and everything is terrific, until you are swamped by a sudden uprush of water. Then things go back to normal. That was an infragravity wave.

I don't want to talk about La Niña, East Coast Lows, or beach erosion anymore – it’s too depressing! But let’s talk about something that all of those are related to: ocean waves. How much do you really understand about waves and how they are formed?

Digital Earth Australia (DEA) Coastlines is a free online dataset created by Geoscience Australia that uses satellite data and some state-of-the-art coastal remote sensing technology to map the typical location of beach shorelines for each year since 1988.

The eruption of the Tongan undersea volcano on January 15 sent tsunami waves across the Pacific resulting in warnings issued by the Bureau of Meteorology and beach closures along the NSW coast.

The easiest rule to remember is that because of the higher frequency of storm events, our beaches tend to have less sand and are much narrower during a La Nina.