Dark days ahead as huge Arctic wildfires spew soot
The Amazon fires are making headlines around the world but it is a blaze burning elsewhere that is causing more alarm among scientists
Devastating wildfires across the world have made front-page news in recent times, from the current blazes in the Amazon, to last year’s deadly fires in Greece, to the widespread property destruction in Canada three years ago. One place you might not expect to be burning, however, is the Arctic. Yet at the time of writing, millions of hectares of land in the Arctic were ablaze.
Fire is a natural part of the ecology of the vast boreal forests that girdle Earth in northern latitudes. But the amount of vegetation that has been on fire across Alaska, Canada and Russia since June is highly unusual. Even Greenland, four-fifths of which is covered in ice, has seen fires. The impacts on human health and the environment are coming into focus – and they are worrying. Is there anything we can do?
Brazil’s space agency has reported a record high of more than 75,000 fires in the Amazon this year. And 2019 has seen other striking fires around the world, including in places not usually known for them, such as Britain. In Indonesia, where fires are often started to clear areas for oil-palm plantations, the fire season may prove to be as bad as that of 2015, when blazes there created a plume of smoke that extended halfway around the planet. A surprising number of crop fires have hit the Netherlands, Germany and Luxembourg, says Cathelijne Stoof of Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
You would be forgiven for thinking that fires are on the rise globally. In fact, the evidence doesn’t bear that out. For example, a 2017 study led by Niels Andela, at Nasa, used satellite images to show that the amount of land being burned worldwide has actually decreased in recent decades. This is probably because of the way we are managing forests to reduce the risk of fire.
Surprising as it may seem, this year isn’t that special when it comes to fire, either, globally speaking. The European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) says that some 3,500 megatonnes of carbon dioxide were emitted from wildfires in the first half of this year. At a global level, that makes 2019 distinctly middling compared with the past 16 years.
