‘Airpocalypse’ Smoke Reaches North Pole for the Very First Time

Santa Claus isn’t expected to notice smoke. Misty smoke of raging Arctic wildfires has reached the North Pole for the first time in recorded history, and NASA satellites have photographs to prove it.

On the sixth of August, NASA’s MODIS, a photographic sensor on the Aqua satellite, captured true-color images of a “vast, thick, acrid blanket of smoke” that clouded over the North Pole. The smoke came from massive fires in northern Russia’s Siberian region.

As reported by China’s Xinhua reporting agency, the Mongolian capital city of Ulaanbaatar had been covered in “colored smoke.” The nation of Yakutia, home to Oymyakon, the coldest living area on Earth, has also been blanketed in smoke, as MODIS photographs captured on the eighth of August indicate.

The dense smoke in Yakutia has prompted air quality readings to fall in recent weeks to an extreme level known as “airpocalypse,” which authorities characterize as having “immediate and heavy impacts on everyone,” according to The Guardian. In the words of NASA, the “airpocalypse” causing smoke was seen traveling 1,864 kilometers from Yakutia to the North Pole in photographs captured on the 6th of August.

” The smoke was so dense that it obscured much of the land below.” It was around 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) from east to west and 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) from south to north, according to the agency. “However, it only captures a small portion of the smoke from the Russian wildfires.”

The smoke had to travel almost 1,200 kilometers to reach Ulaanbaatar on August 4, according to NASA. It seemed to float over the entire Arctic Circle from there, affecting Nunavut, Canada, as well as places in western Greenland.

Wildfires have been raging in Siberia at a far higher rate than in the past. While the entire amount of burned acres is difficult to calculate due to the remote location, Russia’s climate monitoring institute, Rosgidromet, reported last week that about 8.4 million acres were on fire, with more than 34.5 million acres scorched in this season, the second-worst on record. In contrast, just under 4.4 million acres were destroyed during the worst wildfire season on record in California in the same year.

Americans have witnessed personally this year how wildfire smoke can travel thousands of miles in the United States. Fires presently raging in California and Montana have had a significant impact on air quality levels in towns such as Denver, which is nearly 1,000 miles distant from California’s Dixie Fire.

Americans have also been affected by Siberian wildfire smoke, most recently in 2019, when wind currents transported smoke across the Pacific Ocean and into Alaska and northwestern Canada.

Originally published on AccuWeather. Read the original article.