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The Russian military has sent water bombers to support thousands of firefighters battling massive forest fires in Siberia, an area known for its frozen tundra that is now choking in a heat wave.
Flames have ripped through 800,000 hectares of forest and the hardest-hit region of Yakutia in the north has been in a state of emergency for weeks as climatologists sound the alarm on the potential long-term impact.
As of Tuesday, more than 2,600 firefighters were battling fires in Yakutia, which has been the hardest hit by the fires in recent years.
We were suffocating, our lungs are poisoned by the acrid smoke, one of two online petitions from residents of Yakutia to President Vladimir Putin reads. They require more equipment and strength to fight fires.
Russia has seen its annual fire season become more fierce in recent years as climate change has brought unusually high temperatures to the tundra of northern Siberia. This year, temperatures have already reached new records.
The risk of fire has seriously increased in virtually the entire country due to the abnormal heatwave, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Tuesday.
Putin ordered the Defense Ministry to help local authorities, while the military deployed several Ilyushin Il-76 planes to put out the flames from the sky, Shoigu said, without specifying exactly how many planes were sent.
Fires in the central Chelyabinsk region of Russia last week killed a man and destroyed dozens of village houses.
The Siberian fires have raised fears of thawing permafrost and peatlands, releasing carbon long stored in the frozen tundra.
Ash from the fires could also cover the nearby snow cover, making it dark so that it absorbs more solar radiation and heats up even faster.
In 2019 and 2020, the forest fires in Yakutia led to the release of record amounts of greenhouse gases in the region, according to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), which is part of an observation program of the ‘European Union.
Over the past six weeks, fires in the region have produced about 150 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, close to Venezuela’s annual fossil fuel emissions in 2017, said Mark Parrington, senior scientist at CAMS.
Always aggregating the information to try to figure out what it means for the climate, he said. This year we have yet to see so many arctic circle fires in this region, but over the past three to four days we have started to see a number of hot spots and a lot of smoke, a Parrington said.
The country struggled in a heatwave that broke several temperature records in western Russia. Moscow suffocated on its hottest June day for 120 years after the temperature hit 34.7C.
In Siberia, the city of Yakutsk reached 35 ° C at one point; and the city of Verkhoyansk, considered one of the coldest places on the planet, recorded temperatures above 30 ° C, the state weather forecasting agency said.
The temperature is really high, 8 to 10 degrees higher than the norm. It is truly unusual for the temperature to rise above 30 degrees northward, the agency’s scientific director Roman Vilfand said in a briefing.
He said the temperature is expected to drop over the coming week with increased rains, factors that should slightly reduce the risk of new fires, although they may not stop the spread of existing fires.
Similar conditions in parts of Canada and the US Pacific Northwest have also resulted in wildfires. Nearly 60 wildfires were burning on Tuesday in 10 parched western US states, the largest of which was Oregon, consuming an area nearly twice the size of Portland.
These fires will continue to occur with climate change, said Andrey Shegolev, head of the forestry program office at WWF Russia, who called for more funding for local firefighting efforts. The question in this situation is, what to do?
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