The Arctic Is Having the Worst Season for Wildfires on Record

Thomas Smith, environmental geographer at the London School of Economics, said that these fires are bad news for an already struggling climate. “The fires are burning through long-term carbon stores,” he said, “emitting greenhouse gases, which will further exacerbate greenhouse warming, leading to more fires.”

Luckily, much of the Arctic area affected by wildfires is sparsely populated, but wind can carry wildfire pollution thousands of miles. The Siberian fires, for example, extended 1.7 million square miles across central and northern Asia. In Russia the situation appears even worse, with 11 out of 48 Russian regions currently experiencing wildfires, and there are 2.06 million acres engulfed in Alaska.

Unfortunately, according to the WMO’s Claudia Volosciuk, the fires are only precipitating a series of climate events that make global warming even worse. “When particles of smoke land on snow and ice,” she said, “[they] cause the ice to absorb sunlight that it would otherwise reflect, and thereby accelerate the warming in the Arctic.”

And as you can imagine, extinguishing fires in the Arctic is rather difficult. The best hope right now is heavy rainfall.