The smoke of the fire in the forests of Siberia has reached the North Pole. Moscow Times Reports that the smoke from the fire covers an area as large as the whole of Europe.
Russia’s wildfires are now so widespread that this wildfire can be considered the third largest during this century.
The northeastern regions of Siberia are currently experiencing the driest summer in 150 years. There were 211 wildfires active in Russia on Wednesday, with more than 5,000 people working to extinguish the fires.
overwhelming majority Forest fires are raging in northeastern Siberia, in the Yakutia region. Several districts, including the capital Yakutsk, have been under a state of emergency for more than a month.
Firefighters could not get out this week due to heavy smoke. So far this year, the fire in Yakutia has spread to an area of more than 42 million hectares.
The wildfire season in Russia has been one of the worst in over a hundred years.
Photo: Lauren Dauphin / NASA
summer forest fire According to the European Union’s monitoring unit Copernicus, Yakutia has already produced record amounts of carbon dioxide emissions, and there are even more weeks left of the fire season.
Environmental activists fear the fire, induced by warmer weather, could melt Siberian permafrost and peatlands and release even more coal that has been stored in the long-frozen tundra, reports Reuters.
Since June, emissions from fires have exceeded 505 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, according to estimates by the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAM). This is already well above last year’s record total of 450 megatons for the entire fire season, says Mark Parrington, the first researcher at CAM to Reuters.
Although forest fire In Russia’s northern boreal forests that are part of the natural forest cycle, researchers have been amazed by the extent and intensity of fires in recent years.
This coincides with warming in the Arctic, where average temperatures are rising more than three times faster than in the rest of the world.
The cities of Yakutia are sometimes covered with such thick smoke that the sun is completely blocked. Smoke from the Siberian wildfire has also spread south to Mongolia and the capital, Ulaanbaatar.
Last month, Moscow sent military troops and planes to Yakutia to help with the firefight.
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