Amid the coronavirus pandemic crisis across the world, the health of Earth’s coldest areas is greatly deteriorating. Intense wildfires in the Arctic have released more polluting gases into the Earth’s atmosphere in the last month than any other fires in 18 years. Since the start of June, the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) has tracked over 100 intense and long-lived wildfires in the Arctic Circle. Arctic fires emitted close to 16.3 million metric tons of carbon or about 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in June. That’s the highest since 2003 and almost nine times more than the same month in 2018, according to data from Europe’s CAMS.
The fires are a kind of reminder of the vast effect of climate change on Polar regions, which are warming at nearly three times the rate of the rest of the world. Experts from the center also noted that such scale and intensity of the Arctic fires is a matter of concern because large emissions of carbon dioxide result in global warming and could lead to more Arctic permafrost thawing. “Higher temperatures and drier surface conditions are providing ideal conditions for these fires to burn and to persist for so long over such a large area,” Mark Parrington, a fire specialist at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which issued the report, said in a statement. Meanwhile, temperatures in Verkhoyansk, a Siberian town hit a record 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 38 degree Celsius and snow cover in the Arctic reached a record low in June 2020.
The wildfires in Siberia started much earlier in the spring than ever before. The Arctic region is heating twice as fast as the rest of the world. Permafrost is thawing, infrastructure is crumbling, and sea ice is dramatically vanishing.
