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The polar vortex in the US continued inflicting severe conditions across the country on Thursday, with temperatures reaching minus 40F - and a town in Michigan called Hell quite literally freezing over.
Chicago was on track to break the city’s record of -32C (-26F), set more than 30 years ago as the cold snap intensifies.
Some nearby isolated areas could see temperatures as low as -40C (-40F), that would break the Illinois record of minus 38C (-36.4F) set in 1999.
Wind chills reportedly made it feel like -45C (-49F) or worse.
Polar vortex brings temperatures colder than Antarctica to the US
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The blast of polar air that enveloped much of the Midwest on Wednesday closed schools and businesses and strained infrastructure with some of the lowest temperatures in a generation.
The deep freeze snapped rail lines, cancelled hundreds of flights and strained utilities.
Trains and buses in Chicago operated with few passengers as the hardiest commuters ventured out only after covering nearly every square inch of flesh against the extreme chill, which froze ice crystals on eyelashes and eyebrows in minutes.
Crews in Detroit will need days to repair water mains that burst on 30 January, and other pipes can still burst in persistent subzero temperatures.
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Temperatures are expected to improve later this week and more people are expected to return to work in the nation’s third largest city.
Meanwhile, cities like Chicago reportedly experienced "frost quakes," a phenomenon caused by freezing and expanding water under the ground and causes earthquake-like effects.
See The Independent's live coverage of the polar vortex across the United States on Thursday as it happened below:
More than 2,300 flights were canceled and more than 3,500 delayed, most of them out of Chicago's O'Hare International and Midway International airports, according to the flight tracking site FlightAware.com.
General Motors Co said late on Wednesday it would temporarily suspend operations at 11 Michigan plants and its Warren Tech Center after a utility made an emergency appeal to users to conserve natural gas.
Meanwhile, conditions in the Midwest have created an astonishing spectacle in the form of a frozen Lake Michigan, pictures of which have a distinctly other-worldly feel to them. You see them here:
The polar vortex sending record-low temperatures across the United States has strained the nation’s infrastructure, suspended the US postal service — along with thousands of flights — and caused a rising death toll.
2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has tweeted the following message about the polar vortex:
“Extreme temperatures. Monster storms. Donald Trump & the GOP might not believe in science, but I do. We need to make fundamental changes to stop climate change – like passing a Green New Deal in Congress – and save our planet.”
The tweet arrives after Donald Trump joked about the cold temperatures in a tweet refuting the scientific validity of global warming.
The National Weather Service is warning over below average temperatures across “the Upper Mississippi Valley, Great Lakes, into parts of the northern Mid-Atlantic.”
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