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. #environment #methane #artic #wildfires
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