Smoke from forest fires in Siberia reaches the North Pole at its historic beginning | Russia

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Smoke from forest fires in Siberia has reached the North Pole for the first time in recorded history, as a Russian monitoring institute has warned that the fires are getting worse.

Devastating wildfires have swept Siberia with increasing regularity over the past few years, which Russia’s weather officials and environmental experts have linked to climate change and an underfunded forest service.

On Monday, United Nations climate experts published a report that makes it unequivocally clear that global warming is unfolding much faster than feared and that humanity is almost entirely responsible.

Yakutia was one of the hardest hit regions in Siberia this year – Russia’s largest and coldest region lying above permafrost – which experienced record high temperatures and drought.

Russia’s Rosgidromet Weather Institute said on Monday that the situation in the region, also known as Sakha, “continues to deteriorate.” According to Rosgidromet, there are approximately 3.4 million hectares (8.4 million acres) burning in the area, including hard-to-reach and remote areas.

An image released by NASA shows smoke from hundreds of forest fires that blanketed most of Russia on August 6. Photo: NASA Earth Observatory/AFP/Getty Images

And the US space agency, “NASA”, said Saturday, that satellite images showed the smoke of forest fires traveling “more than 3,000 kilometers (1,800 miles) from Yakutia to reach the North Pole,” describing it as “the first in recorded history.” On August 6, she added, most of Russia was covered in smoke.

Environmentalists blame the authorities for letting large areas burn each year under a law that allows them not to intervene if the cost of fighting the fires is greater than the damage caused or if it does not affect populated areas.

According to the Russian Forestry Agency, this year’s fires have destroyed more than 14 million hectares, making it the second worst fire season since the turn of the century.

The head of Russia’s Greenpeace Forestry Program, Alexei Yaroshenko, linked the increasing area of ​​wildfires in Russia to the effects of climate change as well as to the “continuous deterioration of state forest management.”

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