Winter storm "Jonas" blanketed east coast cities under dozens of inches of snow last weekend.

With travel near impossible and power outages reported from Long Island down to Georgia, residents had little choice but to find indoor activities to bide the time. For lovers, the fruits of their amorous activities will become apparent in nine months.

In 2008, John Hopkins researchers Richard W. Evans, Yingyao Hu and Zhong Zhao published a study detailing how major natural events, such as Jonas, directly affect birth rates. "The fertility effect of catastrophe: U.S. hurricane births" combines storm advisory data with birth data taken months after catastrophic weather hit Atlantic and Gulf Coast counties. Researchers found that the storm's severity directly impacted the birth rate; procreation increased for low-severity storms and decreased as danger rose.

"The other thing we found -- that is also intuitive, but no one had ever detected this before - was that, with the most severe storm warnings ... you get almost an equal decrease in births nine months later," Evans told NPR. "And the story there is if you're running for your life, you can't make babies."

Evans considered Jonas a baby-making storm because city officials didn't force evacuations or prompt people to run away. If anything, it caused them to "hunker down" and get comfortable with one another.

Among catastrophic events researchers cite is the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, specifically fertility rates in surrounding counties. In a separate study, parents surveyed ten years later said the terrorist attack made them realize how fragile life is, motivating them to reproduce so their genetic line carried on.

Cleanup efforts have begun along the eastern seaboard following record-setting amounts of snow the blizzard dropped, including an estimated 26.8 inches that fell in New York City.