US facing ice age? Polar vortex changes sending Northern Hemisphere into deep freeze
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How polar vortex cause cold snaps
How stratospheric patterns steer cold air
In today's times, when experts, scientists, and leaders across the globe are contemplating ways to tackle the simmering issue of global warming amid rising temperatures, winters in the Northern Hemisphere are still marked by cold snaps and extreme snowfall events. The Northern Hemisphere often sees snowfall events to some extent, such as the 2021 deep freeze in Texas and Oklahoma that caused over $1 billion in damage.A new study has surfaced that suggests these cold extremes are due to a rising common pattern in the polar vortex . According to LiveScience.com, it is the zone of low pressure that usually circulates over the Arctic. When this vortex gets disturbed, it changes shape and sends cold air into Canada and the U.S. This is happening more often because the Arctic is getting warmer."Overwhelmingly, extreme cold and severe winter weather, heavy snowstorms, and deep snow are associated with these stretched events," study co-author Judah Cohen, the director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research and a visiting scientist at MIT, told Live Science.The study carried out by Cohen and his team looked at how these events evolve in the stratosphere, the middle layer of the atmosphere that starts about 12 miles (19 kilometers) up. Understanding how these patterns shift could help meteorologists make longer-range forecasts, said Andrea Lopez Lang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the research."Knowing this information is useful for a lot of applications in energy and applications in insurance or reinsurance," Lang told Live Science. "How cold is it going to get? Are pipes going to burst? Are insurance claims going to spike this winter?" she added.The polar vortex quite often circulates the North Pole like a spinning top, and occasionally, it collapses dramatically. This usually leads to polar air rushing toward northern Europe and Asia. These collapses can sometimes cause cold snaps in North America , but not always. "There's been this big question mark over what happens in North America," Lang stated.Cohen and his team studied satellite data on the stratosphere and winter weather records from 1980 to 2021. They discovered that, short of total collapse, the polar vortex often wobbles and stretches, like a figure skater flinging out an arm for balance in a tricky spin. The researchers reported in the journal Science Advances that there were five different common patterns in the stratosphere, and two in particular were connected to cold weather dipping into Canada and the U.S. during these stretch events. Stretch events are increasing in general, Cohen said, but there has also been a shift in the type of stretches.One stratospheric pattern usually brings cold air to the East Coast, while another chills the Midwest and Plains. Since 2015, researchers have noticed the westerly pattern happens more often. It's not clear why, but this change seems linked to La Niña, a pattern of unusually cold temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. In the last couple of decades, there have been multiple multiyear La Niña events. In the past twenty years, there have been several La Niña events that lasted for more than one year.The researchers were able to detect some regularities in the way the polar vortex shifts between the five patterns, which might help improve forecasts over the two- to six-week period, Cohen said. "In that shorter range is the poorest accuracy," he said. "This paper can be helpful in that timeframe." One big question is how these polar vortex trends might change over time as the globe warms, Lang said.Cohen and his team have been looking at that question as well. The polar vortex is controlled by waves in the atmosphere, he said, and right now the most influential standing wave is over Eurasia, with a warm ridge to the west and a cooler trough to the east, which in turn is driven by patterns of warming in the Arctic.Currently, melting sea ice is contributing to the increase in the temperature differences between the west and the east, strengthening the wave that can disrupt the vortex, Cohen said. If the sea ice disappeared, the pattern might collapse and flip. Instead of surprisingly cold winter events despite overall global warming, winter might suddenly become much toastier. "We could become more like the Southern Hemisphere, where you rarely get a breakdown of the polar vortex," Cohen said, "and it would probably mean warmer midlatitudes and a colder Arctic."
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Mint
13 hours ago
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Trump's attack on science is growing fiercer and more indiscriminate
SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA are used to being the best. The country is home to the world's foremost universities, hosts the lion's share of scientific Nobel laureates and has long been among the top producers of influential research papers. Generous funding helps keep the system running. Counting both taxpayer and industrial dollars, America spends more on research than any other country. The federal government doles out around $120bn a year, $50bn or so of which goes towards tens of thousands of grants and contracts for higher-education institutions, with the rest going to public research bodies. Now, however, many of America's top scientific minds are troubled. In the space of a few months the Trump administration has upended well-established ways of funding and conducting research. Actions with the stated goal of cutting costs and stamping out diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are taking a toll on scientific endeavour. And such actions are broadening. On May 15th it emerged that the administration had cancelled grants made to Harvard University for research on everything from Arctic geochemistry to quantum physics, following a similar move against Columbia. The consequences of these cuts for America's scientific prowess could be profound. Under the current system, which was established soon after the second world war, researchers apply to receive federal funding from grant-making agencies, namely the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as the Departments of Defence (DoD) and Energy (DoE). Once a proposal has been assessed by a panel of peers and approved by the agency, the agreed money is paid out for a set period. This setup is facing tremendous upheaval. Since Mr Trump's return to the White House, somewhere in the region of $8bn has been cancelled or withdrawn from scientists or their institutions, equivalent to nearly 16% of the yearly federal grant budget for higher education. A further $12.2bn was rescinded but has since been reinstated by courts. The NIH and the NSF have cancelled more than 3,000 already-approved grants, according to Grant Watch, a tracking website run by academics (see chart 1); an unknown number have been scrapped by the DoE, the DoD and others. Most cancellations have hit research that Mr Trump and his team do not like, including work that appears associated with DEI and research on climate change, misinformation, covid-19 and vaccines. Other terminations have targeted work conducted at elite universities. Much more is under threat. The president hopes to slash the NIH budget by 38%, or almost $18bn; cut the NSF budget by $4.7bn, more than 50%; and scrap nearly half of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. All told, the proposed cuts to federal research agencies come to nearly $40bn. Many have already gone under the knife. In March the Department for Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the NIH, announced it would scrap 20,000 jobs, or 25% of its workforce. According to news reports, about 1,300 jobs, or more than 10%, have been lost at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which carries out environmental and climate research. Staff cuts were reportedly also due to start at the NSF, but have been temporarily blocked by courts. To save more money, the NIH, the NSF, the DoE and the DoD have launched restrictive caps on so-called indirect grant costs, which help fund facilities and administration at universities. (These limits have also been partly blocked by courts.) The administration says it has a plan. Mr Trump entered office on a mission to cut government waste, a problem from which the scientific establishment is not immune. On May 19th Michael Kratsios, his scientific adviser, stood up in front of the National Academies of Sciences and defended the administration's vision. It wants to improve science by making it better and more efficient, he said—to 'get more bang for America's research bucks". To do so, funding must better match the nation's priorities, and researchers should be freed from groupthink, empowered to challenge each other more freely without fear of convention and dogma. Shaking things up He is right that science has a number of stubborn problems that can hardly be solved by a business-as-usual approach. Scientific papers are less disruptive and innovative than they used to be, and more money has not always translated into speedier progress. In the pharmaceutical sciences, new drug approvals have plateaued in recent years despite ever larger budgets. Researchers also spend much too long writing grant proposals and completing similar administrative tasks, which keeps them away from their laboratories. Some of Mr Trump's proposals are, in fact, overdue. Many NASA watchers, for example, would agree with his plan to find commercial alternatives for the Space Launch System, a giant rocket being built to take people to the Moon and beyond but which is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. It would be hard, if not impossible, to improve the science funding system without some disruption. The problem, however, is that the administration's cuts are broader and deeper than they first appear, and its methods more chaotic. Take the focus on DEI, which the administration bemoans as a dangerous left-wing ideology. The agencies are targeting it because of an executive order banning them from supporting such work. But DEI is notoriously ill-defined. Programmes that are being cancelled are not just inclusive education schemes, but also projects that focus on the health of at-risk groups. Though it is mostly unclear why specific projects have been cancelled, Grant Watch keeps track of words that could have landed researchers in trouble. 'Latinx", for example, is a term for Hispanic people flagged as a telltale sign of DEI by Ted Cruz, a Republican senator. The NIH has cancelled a project on anal-cancer risk factors, the abstract of which uses the word Latinx. Another cancelled project concerns oral and throat cancer, for which gay men are at higher risk. Its abstract uses the phrase 'sexual and gender minority". There are many such examples. Other cuts may do more damage. Some NIH-funded research on vaccines has been cancelled, as have $11bn-worth of special funds from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for pandemic-related research. In March Ralph Baric, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who helped test the Moderna mRNA vaccine for covid-19, had several vaccine grants terminated. One project aimed to develop broad-spectrum vaccines for the same family of viruses that SARS-CoV-2 comes from; scientists fear other strains might cross from animals to humans. Both the CDC and NIH justified such cuts by saying that the covid-19 pandemic is over. But this is short-sighted, argues Dr Baric, given the number of worrying viruses. 'We're in for multiple pandemics" in the future, he says. 'I guess we'll have to buy the drugs from the Chinese." Even for scientists who have not been affected by cuts, other changes have made conducting research more challenging. For example, the NIH and NSF have both delayed funding new grants. Jeremy Berg, a biophysicist at the University of Pittsburgh who is tracking the delay in grant approvals, wrote in his May report that the NIH has released about $2.9bn less funding since the start of the year, relative to 2023 and 2024. According to media reports, the NSF has stopped approving grants entirely until further notice. At the NIH itself, the largest biomedical research centre in the country, lab supplies have become more difficult to procure. Department credit cards have been cut back and the administrative staff who would normally place orders and pay invoices have been fired. Scientists report shortages of reagents, lab animals and basic equipment like gloves. All these factors are destabilising for researchers—labs need a steady, predictable flow of cash and other resources to continue functioning. If next year's cuts to federal agencies are approved, more pain could be coming (see chart 2). The NSF's budget cuts, for instance, will hit climate and clean energy research. And, according to leaked documents, the research arm of NOAA would most probably cease to exist entirely. That would almost certainly mean defunding the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University, 'one of the best labs in the world for modelling the atmosphere", says Adam Sobel, a professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. NASA's Earth-observation satellites would likewise take a beating, potentially damaging the agency's ability to keep track of wildfires, sea-level rises, surface-temperature trends and the health of Earth's poles. Those effects would be felt by ordinary people both in America and abroad. And as Mr Trump increasingly wields grant terminations as bludgeons against institutions he dislikes, even projects that his own administration might otherwise have found worthy of support are being cancelled. Take his feud with Columbia. His administration has accused the institution of inaction against antisemitism on campus after Hamas's attack on October 7th 2023 and Israel's subsequent war in Gaza. On March 10th the NIH announced on X that it had terminated more than 400 grants to Columbia on orders from the administration, as a bargaining chip to get the university to take action. Some $400m of funding has been withheld, despite Columbia having laid out what it is doing to deal with the administration's concerns. Those grants include fundamental research on Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia and HIV—topics that a spokesperson confirmed to The Economist represent priority areas for the NIH. Columbia is not alone. The administration is withholding $2.7bn from Harvard University, which has responded with a lawsuit. Within hours of Harvard refusing the administration's demands, scientists at some of the university's world-leading labs received stop-work orders. The administration has since said that Harvard will be awarded no more federal grants. Letters from the NIH, the NSF, the DoD and the DoE sent to Harvard around May 12th seem to cancel existing grants as well. While it is too soon to say exactly how many grants are involved, 188 newly terminated NSF grants from Harvard appeared in the Grant Watch database on May 15th, touching all scientific disciplines. A leaked internal communication from Harvard Medical School, the highest-ranked in the country, says that nearly all its federal grants have been cancelled. Cornell University says it too has received 75 stop-work orders for DoD-sponsored research on new materials, superconductors, robotics and satellites. The administration has also frozen over $1.7bn destined for Brown, Northwestern and Princeton universities and the University of Pennsylvania. As these efforts intensify, scientists are hoping that Congress and the courts will step in to limit the damage. 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When on May 14th Mr Kennedy appeared before lawmakers to defend the restructuring of the HHS, Bill Cassidy, the Republican chairman of the Senate health committee, asked him to reassure Americans that the reforms 'will make their lives easier, not harder". Courts will have their say as well. On May 5th 13 universities sued the administration over the NSF's new indirect-cost cap, and the American Association of University Professors has likewise sued Mr Trump over his treatment of Harvard and Columbia. Harvard's suit is ongoing. Dr Baric is one researcher who has had his grant terminations reversed in this manner. His state of North Carolina, alongside 22 other states and the District of Columbia, sued the HHS over the revoked CDC funding for vaccine research. On May 16th the court ruled that the federal government had overstepped and not followed due process, and ordered the HHS to reinstate the funding. Reversing more cuts will take time, however. 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Time of India
a day ago
- Time of India
India taking active interest in Arctic, Antarctic: Shashi Tharoor
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said on Wednesday that India is taking active interest in the polar regions of Arctic and Antarctic as he chaired a meeting of Parliament's Standing Committee on External Affairs. Senior officials of the ministries of external affairs and earth sciences briefed the committee members. Explore courses from Top Institutes in Please select course: Select a Course Category Though developed countries are ahead of India in terms of presence in the two regions, which carry increasing geopolitical significance, India has also become involved and is taking active interest in both places, Tharoor said. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like No annual fees for life UnionBank Credit Card Apply Now Undo It was a very unusual and interesting topic, he said, noting that Arctic and Antarctic are very important for scientific exploration. While Arctic has faced some geopolitical conflict, Antarctic is considered a "global common", he added. India has been particularly active in Antarctic and has a station there as well, he added. Live Events The agenda of the meeting was "India's Role and Presence in the Arctic and Antarctic Regions".
News18
2 days ago
- News18
Science, local sleuthing identify 250-year-old shipwreck on Scottish island
London, Jul 23 (AP) When a schoolboy going for a run found the ribs of a wooden ship poking through the dunes of a remote Scottish beach, it sparked a hunt by archaeologists, scientists and local historians to uncover its story. Through a mix of high-tech science and community research, they have an answer. Researchers announced Wednesday that the vessel is very likely the Earl of Chatham, an 18th-century warship that saw action in the American War of Independence before a second life hunting whales in the Arctic — and then a stormy demise. 'I would regard it as a lucky ship, which is a strange thing to say about a ship that's wrecked," said Ben Saunders, senior marine archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology, a charity that helped community researchers conduct the investigation. 'I think if it had been found in many other places, it wouldn't necessarily have had that community drive, that desire to recover and study that material, and also the community spirit to do it," Saunders said. Uncovered after 250 years The wreck was discovered in February 2024 after a storm swept away sand covering it on Sanday, one of the rugged Orkney Islands that lie off Scotland's northern tip. It excited interest on the island of 500 people, whose history is bound up with the sea and its dangers. Around 270 shipwrecks have been recorded around the 50-square-kilometre island since the 15th century. Local farmers used their tractors and trailers to haul the 12 tons of oak timbers off the beach, before local researchers set to work trying to identify it. 'That was really good fun, and it was such a good feeling about the community – everybody pulling together to get it back," said Sylvia Thorne, one of the island's community researchers. 'Quite a few people are really getting interested in it and becoming experts." Dendrochronology — the science of dating wood from tree rings — showed the timber came from southern England in the middle of the 18th century. That was one bit of luck, Saunders said, because it coincides with 'the point where British bureaucracy's really starting to kick off" and detailed records were being kept. 'And so we can then start to look at the archive evidence that we have for the wrecks in Orkney," Saunders said. 'It becomes a process of elimination. 'You remove ones that are Northern European as opposed to British, you remove wrecks that are too small or operating out of the north of England and you really are down to two or three … and Earl of Chatham is the last one left." Wars and whaling Further research found that before it was the Earl of Chatham, the ship was HMS Hind, a 24-gun Royal Navy frigate built in Chichester on England's south coast in 1749. Its military career saw it play a part in the expansion — and contraction — of the British Empire. It helped Britain wrest control of Canada from France during the sieges of Louisbourg and Quebec in the 1750s, and in the 1770s served as a convoy escort during Britain's failed effort to hold onto its American colonies. Sold off by the navy in 1784 and renamed, the vessel became a whaling ship, hunting the huge mammals in the Arctic waters off Greenland. Whale oil was an essential fuel of the Industrial Revolution, used to lubricate machinery, soften fabric and light city streets. Saunders said that in 1787 there were 120 London-based whaling ships in the Greenland Sea, the Earl of Chatham among them. A year later, while heading out to the whaling ground, it was wrecked in bad weather off Sanday. All 56 crew members survived — more evidence, Saunders says, that this was a vessel blessed with luck. Community effort The ship's timbers are being preserved in a freshwater tank at the Sanday Heritage Centre while plans are discussed to put it on permanent display. Saunders said that the project is a model of community involvement in archaeology. 'The community have been so keen, have been so desirous to be involved and to find out things to learn, and they're so proud of it. It's down to them it was discovered, it's down to them it was recovered and it's been stabilized and been protected," he said. For locals, it's a link to the island's maritime past — and future. Finding long-buried wrecks could become more common as climate change alters the wind patterns around Britain and reshapes the coastline. 'One of the biggest things I've got out of this project is realizing how much the past in Sanday is just constantly with you — either visible or just under the surface," said Ruth Peace, another community researcher. (AP) RD RD (This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed - PTI) view comments First Published: July 23, 2025, 16:45 IST Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
