For weeks, wildfires have raged across Alaska’s vast Southwest region — threatening villages, burning up hundreds of thousands of acres and pushing smoke far across the state.
Fire on the Southwest Alaska tundra isn’t unheard of, but as climate change continues to reshape the state’s environment, tundra fires are becoming both more frequent and more severe.
The East Fork Fire, currently burning in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, is the largest fire on record in the area, having burned some 125,000 acres so far, according to Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
And of the 700,000 acres burned in Alaska this fire season, most of that has been in the Southwest, said Zav Grabinski, a fire science communication specialist for the Alaska Fire Science Consortium.