A CLAIM circulating online warns that a massive Kelvin wave will raise sea levels by as much as a foot prompting alarm on social media.
The term "Kelvin wave" sounds technical enough to be convincing, and a foot of extra sea level is alarming enough to make anyone who lives near the coast sit up.
But is a giant Kelvin wave really about to raise sea levels in Malaysia?
Verdict:
FALSE
The Kelvin wave currently being tracked by oceanographers is a real phenomenon, but it is headed in entirely the wrong direction to affect Malaysia, and the foot-rise warning applies to the United States, not to Malaysian waters.
A Kelvin wave is not a breaking wave like the ones at the beach but a vast, slow-moving pulse of warm water that travels through the ocean over weeks and months, stretching thousands of kilometres across the equatorial Pacific.
These waves are triggered when trade winds that normally blow warm surface water westward across the Pacific weaken or reverse, causing that warm water to slosh back eastward instead.
Crucially, oceanic Kelvin waves travel eastward, from the western Pacific toward the coast of South America and then poleward along the coasts of Chile, Mexico and ultimately California, not westward toward South-East Asia.
Nasa's Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite, which monitors sea level height data, confirmed that the Kelvin wave that formed in early 2026 emerged in the western Pacific near Micronesia in January, dissipated by mid-February and was followed by a larger wave that moved steadily eastward, with seas around Peru rising more than 15 centimetres above long-term averages by mid-May 2026.
The foot-rise warning, reported by AccuWeather based on research from North Carolina State University, refers specifically to the forecast that sea levels along the US West Coast, particularly in California, could temporarily rise by up to 30cm above normal as the Kelvin wave moves northward from offshore Mexico, combined with the effects of El Niño, rising sea levels from climate change and winter storms.
Malaysia is thankfully on the wrong side of the Pacific for any of this to apply.
Malaysia's sea levels are rising, but gradually and for different reasons entirely.
A peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, which modelled sea level rise in Malaysian waters using CMIP6 global climate models, found that sea levels around Malaysia are rising at a rate of 3.5 to 4.5 millimetres per year, driven by climate change and thermal expansion of the oceans, not by Kelvin wave activity.
That is a real and serious long-term concern, but it bears no resemblance to a sudden foot-high surge and is not what the current Kelvin wave claim is describing.
The claim appears to be a case of a genuine scientific story about the US West Coast being stripped of its geographic context and reshared with a Malaysian audience as though it applied here.
It does not.
Sources:
2. https://science.nasa.gov/
3. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-
