Ballrooms were big in the 1920s, and one of the biggest was at the Santa Monica Pier. There are no hidden bunkers or drone armies at the La Monica Ballroom, but there were a lot of gold gilt embellishments. Flappers danced the Charleston to live jazz music in this Arabian nights fantasy pavilion, with its golden onion domes and fairytale towers. Later, it served as the headquarters for the Santa Monica lifeguards, a WWII military installation, a public aquarium, a city jail, an early TV studio, and a roller rink. Join us for a visit to this long lost but not forgotten landmark in this issue of TNT! Cover Art & Design by Urs Baur
Kelvin waves are in the news, because one is currently on its way to the California coast, and it has the potential to raise sea level by as much as a foot, once it arrives in late September or early October.
That’s bad news for the fire-scarred local coast, where parts of Pacific Coast Highway still remain vulnerable to collapse in the aftermath of the 2025 Palisades Fire, but at least we know it’s coming, and why, and we have a little time to prepare.
The Kelvin wave currently headed for the California coast is a component of this year’s super El Niño. It’s being generated by a downwelling of warm water in the western Pacific. A foot of sea level rise may not seem like much, but this isn’t the kind of wave that washes up on the shore and dissipates. Visualize the water in a tub being displaced by the bather. The water level rises and the wave generated pushes the water to the sides of the tub, where it could slop over onto the floor if the tub is too full, or the bather too energetic.
A Kelvin wave is a massive mound of water that is displaced from somewhere else in the ocean and gets trapped along the coast by the force of the Earth’s rotation. This kind of wave increases the impact of high tides and big surf, and it doesn’t just go away, it can linger for weeks or months.The bather displacing that water in this case is the unusually warm water generated by El Niño conditions; the tub is the western Pacific basin; and the California coast has the misfortune of playing the bathroom floor about to be flooded. In a worst case scenario, we may be in for a lot of mopping up.
Kelvin waves were discovered by William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, who was a professor at the University of Glasgow for 53 years. Thomson was awarded a peerage for his numerous scientific discoveries. The most famous was determining a number for the hypothetical temperature that is so cold that all atomic activity stops, known as absolute zero, or 0 Kelvin, but the Kelvin wave was an important discovery, too.
“On gravitational oscillations of rotating water” was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, in 1879. This discovery continues to help scientists understand our world.
Kelvin waves were first connected to El Niño in 1975. The discovery was made by University of Hawaii meteorologist and oceanographer Klaus Wyrtki, using data collected by the North Pacific Experiment, or NORPAX, a project with funding from NOAA and other government agencies.
Scientists continued to build on that research. By 1983, one of the strongest El Niño years on record, they had a much clearer picture of how the weather phenomenon worked.
Today, researchers not only know how and why Kelvin waves form, but how to predict them and track them, and thanks to that research, scientists can predict this wave’s potential impact. Research yields cumulative results.
The Kelvin wave headed to California and the El Niño that is generating it have the potential to do a lot of damage, but not as much as the current administration is doing to our future by killing the programs that monitor weather conditions like El Niño, and fund research. Cuts to NOAA have already eliminated critical ocean monitoring equipment and programs, and the personnel qualified to run them and analyze the data they collected.
We are losing real-time data on ocean temperatures and currents, and the ability to accurately predict potentially deadly weather events, including hurricanes and El Niño cycles.
Scientific research isn’t just an academic exercise, it provides essential tools for human survival, which is why the current administration’s speed run to defund, destroy, and dismantle agencies like NOAA is so inexplicable.
Science doesn’t care if people believe in it or not. Kelvin waves exist whether we know about them or not, but understanding the phenomena that shape our world and impact our lives is incredibly important for the continued survival of humans.
The decision to restore or continue to defund research of the kind discussed here will be in the hands of a newly elected Congress soon. The state of California will begin mailing ballots for the November 3 midterm election on October 5. Ballots can be dropped off at a secure drop-off location—including the Topanga Library—beginning October 6, or returned by mail.
The wave is coming. Get ready.
Stay safe, be well.
