Chilling pictures of the burning Arctic that will make you shudder

Satellites observed thick plumes of smoke rising from dozens of large wildfires in SiberiaNASA Earth Observatory

  • The Earth’s Arctic region is on fire and it’s all thanks to climate change.
  • The peripheries of the Northern Hemisphere are heating up twice as fast as the rest of the Earth.
  • Wildfires in Alaska, Siberia, Russia and Greenland are releasing a record amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — making a bad problem even worse.
If you think that climate change is making your summers hotter, be thankful that you don’t live in the Arctic.

The entire region, stretching from Siberia all the way to Alaska, is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the Earth. It’s gotten so hot that it’s literally on fire.


It’s not that wildfires are uncommon in the Arctic region, in fact they happen every summer. But this time around, even the The World Meteorological Organisation ( WMO) called it ‘unprecedented’ noting that its monitoring service, CAMS, has tracked over 100 wildfires in the Arctic Circle.

Large wildfires continue to burn in Alaska seen from space on ThursdayCopernicus, WMO

Breaking records
Aside endangering wildlife and their habitats, the fires released an exorbitant amount of carbon dioxide.

In June alone, fires in the Arctic released over 50 megatonnes of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, according to the WMO — the same as Sweden’s emissions over a whole year.

Wildfire in the Qeqqata Kommunia, Greenland on July 14Pierre Markuse/Flickr

Mark Parrington, a senior scientist with Europe’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring service, notes that since then, carbon dioxide released from fires in the Arctic has reached 100 megatons — breaking previous records.

It affects you even if you don’t live on the North Pole
The impact of these fires is crossing borders. Russia, for instance, is the victim of the smoke plumes degrading the air quality in some of its cities according to NASA’s Earth Observatory.

Wildfires in Russia on July 21Pierre Markuse/Flickr

Permafrost, or peat, in the region stores a lot of the carbon dioxide that’s released on Earth. While the peat isn’t in the direct line of fire — no pun intended — it’s still left will less cover against direct sunlight. This increases the odds of it thawing out and releasing all of its stored carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

See also:
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