Alaska's active fire season is expected to get worse

A fire near St. Mary's, Alaska.
(Image credit: Ryan McPherson/Bureau of Land Management Alaska Fire Service via AP)

More than 530 wildfires have been reported in Alaska so far this fire season, burning an area the size of Connecticut, and the worst is likely to come.

One death has been linked to the fires; a pilot delivering equipment to firefighters died after his helicopter crashed. While not much property has been damaged, the smoke is causing extremely unhealthy air quality, with two fires in the southwestern part of the state sending smoke hundreds of miles north to Nome. "I would never have thought you could get that poor of air quality back 400 miles from the active fires, and that is a testament to how hot those fires were," Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy at the University of Alaska's International Arctic Research Center, told The Associated Press.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.