Arctic Wildfires Show Approach of New Climate Feedback Loop: In two of the world’s warmest years, fires in the northernmost
regions incinerated an area of forest and peatland bigger than Denmark,
and almost as big as Slovakia, to release 150 million tons of carbon
into the atmosphere, concludes a peer-reviewed study released last week by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

And
the scientists warn there could be an exponential relationship between
even tiny advances in temperature and the area at risk from fire. In
2019 and 2020, fires in the Siberian Arctic scorched 47 million
hectares, or 47 thousand square kilometres of land. This adds up to 44%
of all the area burned in the region in the last 40 years.

The
Arctic soils are a natural reservoir of vast amounts of stored carbon.
But as the global thermometer rises, once-waterlogged and frozen
peatland dries and becomes potentially flammable. A few lightning
strikes, a blaze in the boreal forest, and what had once been a carbon
sink becomes a carbon source, as centuries of stored soil carbon goes up
in smoke, methane, and carbon dioxide.

In the course of what used
to be a normal year, Arctic permafrost and tundra soils are calculated
to absorb 100 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, the study
says. In just two very recent years, wildfire actually liberated half as
much again.

Inevitably, a greater burden of atmospheric carbon
means a warmer world, which in turn means an ever greater danger of peat
and timber fires in the Siberian and Canadian Arctic, to drive global
heating to ever more dangerous levels.