Do you know what a polar vortex is? Well a polar vortex happens every 5 years for 4 days and really only affects the Midwest and the Northeastern parts of North America. A polar vortex is where the cold air from the North Pole and Greenland move South, but this year if you thought it was harsh then you’d be wrong because it was actually quite wimpy compared to the ones before, and here’s why.
Now that the polar vortex is being swept away by the warm weather, many people are being swept away with clarity that the cold weather is gone. However, this most recent polar vortex wasn’t even the worst one. Over the past years, the polar vortexes have been weakened by global warming and the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In the earlier decades, the polar vortexes were truly monstrous compared to the one we had this year. There is evidence that proves this from the “cold-wave index” made by Kenneth Kunkel, a researcher at North Carolina State University. He also got over 20 years of information on the extreme cold waves from all over America. There are records of the cold wave dated all the way back to 1895, but the most recent one that was really big was in 1996. The cold waves peaked in the 1980s then reached a low point in the 2000s.
I chose this article because it seemed interesting and I wanted to know as much as I could about the polar vortexes and global warming. I would like to help improve the environment. Before reading this article, I had not idea what a polar vortex was and how it impacts weather across the world. I believe more people need to be educated on this topic so they can truly grasp how they are impacting the world they live in. With every fossil fuel they burn or every fire they start, they are causing something so beautiful and what we rely on daily to slowly and disappear.
In conclusion, we need to do something about the greenhouse gases and the global warming. If we don’t make changes now, then the polar vortex will go away and seas will rise leaving us with little land to live on. How does that work in an equation where our population is growing? We all need to come together to help preserve the polar vortexes. To do this we need to try and stop using as many fossil fuels so we can help preserve the earth.
