English: Heavy smoke shrouded eastern Siberia as many dozens of wildfires turned boreal forest into ash in early July 2012. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a true-color image of the outrageously smoky scene on July 1.

Most of the fires in this image are burning in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), a sparsely-populated region which covers about half of Russia’s Far East. On July 3, several media outlets reported that Russian authorities stated that there were 196 forest fires affecting 288,460 hectares. That is an area larger than the country of Luxembourg.

The boreal fire season, which affects parts of Russia, Canada, and the U.S. state of Alaska, typically runs from May through October and peaks in July or August. Extremely hot temperatures in the Arctic and over much of Russia prompted an early start this spring, with parts of western Siberia reporting a high number of blazes as early as April. By mid-May, fires were also rising to above-average numbers in eastern Siberia. By July, even though sea ice remained on parts of the Sea of Okhotsk, fire was abundant in the forests of Siberia.

The Arctic region experienced its worst wildfire season on record—for the second year in a row—in 2020.