Siberia: the abnormal heat has brought forward the wildfire season
Environment — di Lorenzo Brenna
The unusual heatwave that has struck the Arctic is causing wildfires in Siberia to increase fivefold.
Siberia: the abnormal heat has brought forward the wildfire season
The unusual heatwave that has struck the Arctic is causing wildfires in Siberia to increase fivefold.
After recording record temperatures just a few days ago, with peaks of 38 degrees in what should be one of the coldest places on the planet, in Siberia, as anticipated, serious wildfires have broken out that seem to take us back a year, when enormous blazes devastated the Arctic.
🟠 (Thread) Right now there are quite a few #wildfires🔥 burning in the #Arctic. Here some examples in the #SakhaRepublic, #Russia🇷🇺, all within the #ArcticCircle. All images are from June 27th, 2020 #Copernicus #Sentinel-2🛰️ #ArcticHeatWave #RemoteSensing #scicomm #OpenData 1/3
Tundra in flames
According to reports from Avialesookhrana, the Russian government agency responsible for aerial management of forest fires, 1.15 million hectares of tundra are burning in areas that firefighters cannot reach.
The flames were detected on 25 June by the Sentinel satellite of the Copernicus programme of the European Space Agency and the European Commission, and it is said to be the most northerly fire in recent years.
Arctic wildfires burning further north than previously spotted from space, satellite shows. Blazes raging just 50km from the Arctic Ocean in Yakutia siberiantimes.com/other/others/n…
The worst-affected area
The area hardest hit by the flames is the autonomous Republic of Sakha-Yakutia, in eastern Siberia, where the village of Verkhoyansk is located — the place where, on 20 June last, a temperature of 38 degrees Celsius was reportedly recorded (a figure currently under review by the World Meteorological Organization), an absolute record for the Arctic.
Last August's wildfires charred more than four million hectares of forest in Siberia. This year the fires began breaking out much earlier than usual.
An unnatural heat
To grasp the scale of the upheaval gripping the Arctic — with consequences for the entire planet — it is enough to consider that, according to Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, average temperatures in the region are around three degrees higher (with peaks of ten degrees in some areas of Siberia) than they were in the nineteenth century.
The future is now
The exceptionally high temperatures, born of the climate crisis shaking the planet, have continued since January. "In this part of Siberia the signs of climate change are already here," Amber Soja, a NASA researcher who has conducted field research in the area, told the Associated Press. "This year's heat and fires are only adding further evidence to the climate change signal we have observed in these forests for years."
Il 20 giugno é stato stabilito il record di temperatura per la #Siberia e per il #CircoloPolareArtico: +38°C. L'Artico si sta scaldando piú velocemente del resto del pianeta, questo é solo uno dei campanelli d'allarme. Dobbiamo #agireora prima che sia troppo tardi.
If the permafrost melts, we're in trouble
The Arctic has warmed at twice the global average rate over the past 30 years, threatening the survival of a delicate and vital ecosystem. Global warming, in addition to causing the fires that produce the emission of millions of tonnes of CO2 and exacerbating coastal erosion that endangers several communities, is causing the permafrost to melt.
The degradation of the permafrost will have serious consequences on a global scale: it leads to the release of large quantities of methane and carbon dioxide, and could bring to the surface ancient and dangerous pathogens trapped in the ice for millennia, capable of triggering new pandemics.