Chicago gets rebranded #Chiberia as Polar Vortex hits the US.

The UK may have seen its first flurries of snow in recent days, but the US city of Chicago has been experiencing Arctic levels of cold as the Polar Vortex takes hold. People from the city on the shores of Lake Michigan have been posting their footage to social media and rebranding their home #Chiberia as temperatures dropped to -28 degrees Celsius, the coldest in the city on record. One man posted a video to Twitter showing what appeared to be ice and snow inside his home.“Just took a shower and the steam froze around where the leaks are in my front door,” he said. Elsewhere, one man woke up to find that his doorknob had frozen inside his house. Another man showed a t-shirt frozen solid and “stiff as a board” after hanging it outside on the railings of a balcony. In nearby Toledo, temperatures had dropped so low that a cup of coffee thrown into the air appeared to turn to snow as it evaporated into a vapour and then condensed into a cloud almost instantaneously. And a police force in Warrensburg, Missouri, near Kansas City, asked residents to “keep the criminality to a minimum” while the cold lasted. Earlier in the week, a mother caught her son cleaning up the snow near their home in Michigan while wearing a dinosaur costume and posted the footage to Twitter. The Nasa Earth Twitter account explained the dramatic cold weather was caused by the Polar Vortex, which usually “swirls around the Arctic”.“Recently, this pressure system has been less stable, spilling colder air south & bringing record-low temperatures to parts of the continental US,” their tweet continued.

Mark Powell@FrGoose13 

Chilly morning in #Chicago #PolarVortex 18.5K

6,457 people are talking about this 

Nicholas William Walcott@big6live

Insane @weatherchannel @accuweather #winterstormjayden #windchillwarning #albertaclipper #Chiberia

3,159  771 people are talking about this

Terry Greenbeans@TerryGreenbeans

It’s a little cold in #Chiberia @barstoolWSD @barstoolcarl @RedLineRadio8,027  3,122 people are talking about this

BeeMoQ@mommymadonna
I told my kid to shovel the snow. I checked my video cam to make sure he was doing it. This is what I see. #michigansnow
63.4K 21.6K people are talking about this

NASA Earth✔@NASAEarth 

Normally, the #PolarVortexswirls around the Arctic, trapping cold air near the Pole. Recently, this pressure system has been less stable, spilling colder air south & bringing record-low temperaturesto parts of the continental U.S. 2,836 1,666 people are talking about this