Francis's research focuses on climate change in the Arctic, and has published over 40 scientific papers on the topic.[3] It is also her opinion that warming in the Arctic may be changing the jet stream, which, in turn, may be leading to abnormal weather patterns such as an unusually long winter in the United Kingdom,[4][5] the 2013 Colorado floods,[6] and the unusually cold conditions across much of the southern United States in early 2014.[7][8] Specifically, Francis argues that the heating and cooling of Arctic seawater (the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the world) has slowed down the jet stream, resulting in weather conditions persisting for longer than they usually would.[9][10] That the warming in the Arctic is linked to extreme weather elsewhere in the world is a view supported by some of Francis's research, such as a study published in Geophysical Research Letters in 2012.[11][12]