A deep freeze threatened much of the eastern US seaboard Tuesday as the mercury plunged into lows not seen in nearly two decades, government forecasters said.

“Dangerously cold Arctic air” will descend on the eastern two-thirds of the nation after gripping northern and mid-western states since Sunday, the National Weather Service warned.

The Arctic blast

The polar vortex, as the Arctic blast is known, had swept across the Midwest with wind chills down to minus 50 Celsius in Minnesota and Montana, according to the government weather service.

Temperatures in Buffalo, New York, had already plunged to minus 15 degrees Celsius, but the wind chill factor was calculated at minus 36 degrees, the private AccuWeather service reported.

Hundreds of thousands of school children remained home across dozens of states, and many would not see schools reopen until Thursday — even in the winter-hardy states of the northern plains. The danger of exposure to frostbite and was too great to allow them out of doors.

The extreme cold reached into the southern states, prompting frost warnings in Florida. Pipes froze in southern homes not insulated for extreme cold. In Atlanta, Georgia, the wind chill factor had plunged to minus 23 Celsius early Tuesday, AccuWeather said.

Flights cancelled

More than a dozen deaths have been blamed on the Arctic blast, and more than 10,000 flights were cancelled or delayed on Monday alone, according to the flight tracker FlightAware.com.

NASA postponed a commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station due to the low temperatures, putting off the launch of a cargo spacecraft from a site in Virginia until at least Wednesday.

The jet stream normally holds polar currents at bay, but meteorologists said the stream had dipped further south than usual, allowing the cold currents to move in.

Overall, around 149 million people — about half the US population — were expected to be in the grip of the phenomenon by Tuesday, meteorologists said.

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