There is a remarkable connection between geophysics, namely so called Kelvin and Yanai waves, and topological materials. Kelvin and Yanai waves are regular and stable, always travel eastward around the equator and are important for weather phenomena like El Niño. In two papers Delplace et al. and Xu et al. show that the equator as the boundary between the northern and southern hemisphere plays the role of a boundary in a topological material: The Coriolis force acts like the magnetic field in a quantum Hall device and the equatorial waves are the topologically protected currents at the boundary. The stability of Kelvin and Yanai waves is therefore rooted in nontrivial topological winding numbers that can be defined in frequency-wavevector space, and have actually been experimentally confirmed after their theoretical prediction. Truly remarkable.