It seems that if there’s one thing on Earth more popular than Downton Abbey right now, it’s the polar vortex. That catchy little two-word phrase is being used to explain the frigid temperatures across much of the United States.
On Twitter, everyone from NPR to Stephen Colbert to the Museum of Fine Arts has jumped on the PV bandwagon.
The polar vortex is “a body of extremely cold, dense air that sets up over the pole and is typically held in place by strong westerly winds that encircle it,” according to WGBH science editor Heather Goldstone.
Think of it like an enormous cyclone of extremely cold air that hovers in the atmosphere over the poles year round (yes, there is one over the south pole, too).
Here in the north, it’s strongest during the winter, when the winds can exceed 100 mph. That kind of speed typically keeps that frigid air locked inside, where it belongs, up in the arctic.
Occasionally, those winds weaken and some of that cold air can come spilling out, as it has this week.
None of this is anything new.
Meteorologist Matt Noyes tweeted that the polar vortex itself has been around for more than a billion years.
The term “polar vortex” has been around for decades, but it spent years relegated to science journals, postdoctoral studies and meteorological society lectures.
That changed in the late 1980s, when the depletion of the ozone layer over the arctic became a hot button issue (pun intended). A search of news articles for “polar vortex” showed that the term started cropping up regularly on the pages of publications like the New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today and The Guardian around 1989. Here’s an example from a May 1992 article in The Boston Globe about the role of chlorofluorocarbon in that ozone depletion:
By January of 2005, “polar vortex” had it’s own Wikipedia page – a sure sign that it had truly arrived.
Boston Globe columnist Joanna Weiss even name-checked the polar vortex in a characteristically wry piece about surviving the particularly snowy winter of 2010-2011.
And the polar vortex isn’t just a local phenomenon. Polar vortices have been observed on Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, and Venus, too.
Last summer, a NASA spacecraft even spotted one on Saturn’s moon Titan. Once again, the “polar vortex” was making news. From NBC News:
It wasn’t always like this. Back in January 1985, before the 24-hour news cycle and Twitter, a southward shift of the polar vortex similar to the one we are currently experiencing killed at least 126 people in the US, destroyed 90 percent of Florida’s citrus crop, and set record-lows across the East Coast.
The cold snap was major news, but it doesn’t appear that the term “polar vortex” was a part of the coverage. The New York Times described the event as the “freeze of the century,” and a “bubble of arctic air.” It never once used the term polar vortex.
But as Shakespeare famously wrote, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
So call it what you like but whatever you do, bundle up. Vortex or no vortex, it’s cold out there.
