What’s so special about the equator that permits a Kelvin wave to circulate there? And “why the heck does it always travel east?”
The why, it turned out, was hiding in the quantum realm — a place geophysicists rarely tread.
When Marston and his colleagues looked at Earth’s equatorial Kelvin waves, they saw a regularity that made them wonder if the waves were analogous to the edge current in a topological insulator.
These immense waves propagate around the equator because it is the boundary between two insulators, the hemispheres.
It’s still unclear whether, in the biggest picture, treating Earth as a topological insulator will unlock the mysteries of large-scale weather patterns, or maybe even lead to new geophysical discoveries. For now, it’s a simple reinterpretation of terrestrial phenomena. But decades ago, applying topology to condensed matter was also a reinterpretation of phenomena; von Klitzing discovered the resilience of the edge current in a quantum material, but he had no idea it had anything to do with topology. Later, other physicists reinterpreted his discovery as having a topological explanation, which ended up revealing a host of new quantum phenomena and phases of matter.
How Quantum Physicists Explained Earth’s Oscillating Weather Patterns
Worth posting for the mesmerizing video, if nothing else.
Topological insulators may seem esoteric but they are a big deal in electronics, etc now. That they would scale up to the big world was not obvious.
The western coast of Colombia can get more than 26 metres of rain a year,
One assumes the current up against the Columbia coast in the video is what they mean.