The United States of America is currently exposed to a very cold hurricane bomb that can be placed in the list of "the most severe ever in history". The death toll reached 59 by the morning of December 27, as the snow rose to nearly a meter and a half in the streets.

A "bomb cyclone" is a type of winter storm, but the atmospheric pressure drops very quickly as the storm system intensifies, causing the temperature to change rapidly as well.

For this reason, government agencies had warned that temperatures, which reached 50 degrees below zero in those areas, which are thus close to the temperature of Mars, could kill within minutes, and in fact many of the dead in this wave were found in their cars. And outside the house, some of them were just clearing snow outside the house.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Weather Prediction Center recently announced that the western side of the United States will move into a cooler pattern in the current days than before, and the winds will intensify in a way that can cause severe hazards.

The western side of the United States will move in the current days to a cooler pattern with strong and dangerous winds (Reuters)

Danger swirls

What the United States is facing now relates to what scientists call the "polar vortex", which are areas of low atmospheric pressure, which rotate in a hurricane-like manner at the top of each of the Earth's poles, and extend deep into the atmosphere upwards in those regions, and cause a large mass of the thick cold air below.

These vortices usually continue to rotate at the top of the poles as one stable unit, and the cold air remains confined to the poles only and does not touch the continents below in any way, but these vortices sometimes weaken and fragment, and from here they travel away from the poles.

In this case, cold polar air masses descend to nearby countries such as Canada or the United States, and some of their impact may even reach North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and they may turn into very cold storms, as is happening in the United States now, and in this case temperatures drop. to standard rates sometimes.

Climate change

Of course, we cannot decide that there is a direct link between this particular cold winter storm and climate change, as storms of this type usually hit many regions in the north of the world from time to time.

But research in this area indicates that atmospheric warming is contributing to the fragmentation of the polar vortex at a greater rate than usual, and consequently increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme cold weather.

In a study published in the “Science” journal in 2021, it was found that the warming of the atmosphere also causes the polar vortex to stretch to lower latitudes day after day with higher temperatures, which means that even if it does not break down, its cold air can It reaches many regions in North America and Asia.