You might have heard the news. More records are being set in the Arctic for sea ice loss all the time lately. Most recently in March, the Arctic set a record for the lowest winter sea ice maximum since the advent of satellite observations of the Arctic in 1979. That sounds bad for the Arctic right? But most people don’t live in the Arctic and there are no residents at all in the Antarctic. So why should you care?

It turns out that when there is less sea ice, there is more open water with which the atmosphere can interact. Such interactions include large fluxes of heat from the water to the air. This heat can change the location weather driving system known as the Jetstream. You’ve probably heard Al Roker talking about the Jetstream before, but I can simplify what this is even more. The Jetstream is also called the polar front, a boundary between the colder air from the poles and the warmer air from the tropics. When the boundary is to your south, your weather will get colder. When the boundary is to your north, weather is warmer.

My Master’s Degree research shows that the open water causes this boundary to move dramatically northward over western North America. Because weather comes in waves, eastern North America experiences a trough in the Jetstream leaving a large region much colder than they would be in the Autumn following an extreme ice loss event like that of 2007 or 2012.