AN EXTREME cold snap that left millions of people in Texas without power last winter appears to have been made more likely by melting Arctic sea ice, research suggests. For the past decade, evidence has been building in support of the counter-intuitive idea that some of the recent cold winter spells at mid-latitudes in North America and Eurasia are linked to the Arctic warming faster than the rest of the world due to climate change. That link still isn't fully established. However, a group led by Judah Cohen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that vanishing sea ice and greater snowfall in the Arctic over the past i*0 years - effects caused by climate change - may be driving cold winter weather in North America and Eurasia via the stratospheric polar vortex, the cold winds high above the pole.
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