Australia’s bushfire crisis has arrived to such a tragic and critical apex that the smoke from the climate change-fuelled fires has travelled nearly 10,000 miles to South America and may have reached the Antarctic, according to a terrifying report released by the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization on Tuesday, as reported by Reuters.

“But skies as far away as over central Chile have now gone grey because of the smoke and the WMO cited reports that the sunset in Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, had turned red,” said Reuters. “The fires, which have raged for months in Australia, have already emitted 400 megatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and produced harmful pollutants,” the article went on to paraphrase the EU’s Copernicus monitoring programme.

The possible arrival of smoke from the bush fires to Antarctica is of particular concern, as soot deposits darken the ice and speed their melting, thereby contributing to even greater rates of global warming in a vicious cycle that will lead to more of these kinds of catastrophic fires. “Brown sooty deposits have already been reported on glaciers in New Zealand, potentially accelerating the rate at which they are melting,” the Copernicus programme told Reuters.