The United States is currently under a very cold cyclonic bomb that could be placed on the list of "the most in history", with the death toll reaching 59 by the morning of 27 December, with snow rising to nearly one-and-a-half meters on the streets.
The "bomb cyclone" is a kind of winter storm, but its atmospheric pressure drops very quickly as the storm system intensifies, causing temperatures to change rapidly as well.
For that reason, government agencies had warned that temperatures, which reached minus 50 in those areas and were close to the temperature of Mars, could kill within minutes.
NOAA's Weather Prediction Centre had recently announced that in the current days the western side of the United States would move to a colder pattern than before and that winds would intensify in a manner that could cause severe hazards.
Risk vortices
What the United States is now facing relates to what scientists call the "Polar Vortex", low-air pressure zones, orbiting in a hurricane-like manner at the top of each pole of the Earth, stretching deep up the atmosphere in those regions, and causing a large mass of cold, dense air beneath them.
These vortices usually continue to circulate at the top of the poles as a single stable unit, and the cold air remains confined to the poles only and the continents below them are not touched in any way, but these vortices sometimes weaken and crumble, and hence travel away from the poles.
In this case, cold polar air blocks descend on nearby countries such as Canada or the United States, and some of their effects may even reach North Africa and the Arab Island, and they may become as cold storms as in the United States now, in which case temperatures sometimes drop to record levels.
Climate change
Of course, we cannot decide that there is a direct correlation between this particular cold winter storm and climate change. Storms of this nature usually hit many areas of the world's north from time to time.
But research in this range suggests that atmospheric warming contributes to the fragmentation of the polar vortex at higher rates than usual, and this consequently increases the frequency and intensity of extreme cold weather waves.
In a study published by Science in 2021, warming the atmosphere was also found to be straining the polar vortex to lower latitudes day by day as temperatures rise, meaning that even if it does not crumble, its cold air can reach many regions of North America and Asia.