Scenes · Study 090
Tide Line
A bird's eye view of a shoreline: waves run up the sand, pause, and slide back, leaving dark wet sand and fading lines of foam.
What you're looking at
The water's edge is a line whose height combines a slow in and out rhythm with noise along the beach, so some stretches reach further than others. Sand remembers the highest recent reach and stays dark until it dries. Each time a wave turns back it leaves a pale foam line at its high point, which thins and disappears.
The idea behind it
The zone where this happens is called the swash. Water rushing up carries sand with it and water draining back takes some away, and the balance between the two is what builds or erodes a beach. The scalloped shape of a real wave's edge comes from small differences in slope and wave height along the shore.
Try this
Move the pointer onto the sand to pull the next wave further up the beach where you point.
