The Corruption of the Polar Vortex

Credit: https://www.finegardening.com/article/snowflakes-palm-trees

This photo above seems extremely out of the ordinary and contradicts itself. Of course, when we think of palm trees, tropical climates and beaches come to mind, not a snowstorm and several inches of snow.

This oddity was exactly what I experienced a couple of years ago when my family and I traveled to Los Angeles, California. When we were traveling to Death Valley National Park, snow started to fall heavily as while we were driving south of the city. It was the most peculiar event I’d ever witnessed! Because we were in California, we weren’t prepared for this snowstorm, with clothes that were completely suited towards a tropical climate, not a surprise winter storm. The storm had gotten so fierce that we were forced to ditch our plans to drive to Death Valley.

Odd events like the one I described and the one shown in the photo represent how the temperatures of tropical places could possibly decline in temperature moderate temperature areas thanks to corruption in the Earth’s polar vortex. The polar vortex is a large region of cold, rotating air that commonly inhabits polar regions of the planet, but sometimes, it can weaken, causing it to fluctuate and deviate from its normal position and make its way down south. This brings along with it freezing temperatures and blinding snowstorms. Some scientists have speculated that the cause of these deviations is the increasing temperatures in the polar regions, resulting in the vortex taking a road trip south and leaving a numbing path in its wake.