People in Newfoundland, Canada are still trying to recover from a snowstorm that trapped people in their houses and completely shut down businesses, including grocery stores, for four days. Over the weekend, Newfoundlanders posted pictures of themselves opening their front doors only to find another door facing them in the form of an imprint on a wall of snow, and revelers snowboarding down the street in the aftermath.

So, how does that much snow pile up that quickly? A time-lapse video taken from a security camera on someone’s porch shows how one neighborhood went from a winter wonderland to an apocalyptic wasteland in one day.

Someone’s porch camera shows the blizzard swallowing up a neighborhood

Nest

See how high the snow piles up in the full video

old spikes and smothering blizzards in North America in recent years have had a lot of skeptics questioning whether climate change is really happening. After all, white winters don’t line up with the claims that we’re getting warmer. But climatologists explain that climate change is more than just linear warming all over the globe, and the melting arctic could be the reason why extreme winter weather is making more appearances further south.

The polar vortex is a mass of air that swirls over the arctic. It’s held in place by jet streams, the wind that blows in the atmosphere several miles above the Earth. Temperature and pressure differences usually keep this wind traveling a predictable path, but when the contrast between arctic temperatures and those on the other side of this wall of wind lessens, it weakens. When that happens, the weather that should be in the arctic “escapes”.

While some parts of the world will get milder winters and less snow, those lying in the path that the polar vortex tends to take when it does fluctuate south are getting just the opposite. Climatologists say storms like this could become more than just historic one-off events in years to come, so if you live in the affected zone, you might want to stock up on canned food.