Smoke from wildfires reaches North Pole for first time in recorded history

Wildfire smoke has made it to the North Pole for the first time in recorded history, NASA said, as multiple blazes continued to rage across Russia on Tuesday. One of the country's coldest regions has been especially hard hit, with smoke so bad that it blacked out the sun, the Guardian newspaper reported.

The Sakha Republic in Siberia is one of the coldest areas in the world and sits on top of permafrost. This year it has seen record high temperatures and drought, and vast swaths of its forests have burned. "There have always been large fires in Siberia. It is a landscape evolved to burn," Jessica McCarty, an earth scientist at Miami University in Ohio, told NASA's Earth Observatory. "What is different because of climate change is that fires are burning larger areas, affecting places farther to the north, and consuming fuels that would have been more fire resistant in the past."