4 ms·
The structures are gone, but some of the trees are 1800 years old. They didn't get that old by not being able to survive a fire. It's important to accept that
by cameldrv 6y ago
The structures are gone, but some of the trees are 1800 years old. They didn't get that old by not being able to survive a fire. It's important to accept that fire is a natural part of the ecological cycle in much of California, in fact, aggressive suppression has disrupted the natural cycle and led to more extreme fires.
- mikeyouse 6y agoThis is likely true but modern fires are burning much hotter than historical ones due to the accumulation of brush... it's entirely possible some of them that survived 1000+ years were killed by this latest one.
- 01100011 6y agoYou think that at no time in the last 1000+ years there was a time when brush built up to the levels seen today?
- wyattpeak 6y agoVery possibly not. Brush builds up because we suppress fires, the ecosystem is in a fundamentally different state than it has been for most of the last millennium.
- pacificmint 6y agoGenerally the idea is that historically there were frequent fires which kept the available fuel to a lower level. Humans started fighting wildfires, and for decades we were pretty successful. That resulted in more fuel buildup then happened historically. When those fire finally burn, they often burn hot enough to destroy trees that used to survive the fires. I don’t know what the fuel levels were in this area specifically, but yes, it seems plausible that the brush might not have built up to today’s levels before.
- stickfigure 6y agoAll that is true, but we humans also tend to cause fires more frequently too? I live in a fire zone (I'm writing this from a hotel room that I've been forcibly evacuated to) and while Lightning gets the blame this time (I'm sure PG&E execs are quietly sighing relief), it doesn't seem to be the cause most times. I wonder what the quantifiable overall effect is.
- wyattpeak 6y agoI think it is qualifiable if not quantifiable in that brush is building up. Perhaps more fires are starting, but the net effect would have to be less frequent burns of a given area for brush to build up there.
- zaarn 6y agoModern Wildfires are not always extingushed outright and allowed to burn because the fireservices are acutely aware of this.
- jdietrich 6y agoYes. Efforts to prevent and extinguish wildfires create the conditions for exceptionally severe wildfires. Invasive species, monoculture and climate change have all increased the potential severity of fires.
- asdasfasdfasdf 6y agoYes. We cause worse fires by suppressing smaller ones.
- Smerity 6y agoTo expand on this from the recent Australian fires[1] causing massive damage to traditionally fire resistant environments: > We’re seeing recurrent fires in tall, wet eucalypt forests, which normally only burn very rarely. A swamp dried out near Port Macquarie, and organic sediments in the ground caught on fire. When you drop the water table, the soil is so rich in organic matter it will burn. We’ve seen swamps burning all around. > Even Australia’s fire-adapted forest ecosystems are struggling because they are facing increasingly frequent events. In Tasmania, over the past few years we have seen environments burning that historically see fires very rarely, perhaps every 1000 years. __The increasing tempo, spatial scale, and frequency of fires could see ecosystems extinguished.__ Worsened {frequency, intensity, drought conditions, ...} in fire seasons can be catastrophic even to those environments traditionally considered stable under such pressure. [1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/massive-australian-blazes-will-reframe-our-understanding-bushfire# https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/massive-australian-b...
- ummonk 6y agoI'm cautiously optimistic. Old growth redwood forests like Big Basin and Muir tend not to have highly dense brush.
- bradly 6y agoAnother part of the problem is many people buying second homes in wooded areas that now prevent controlled burns to clear the extra brush. This has become a big issue in Colorado.
- EVdotIO 6y agoFires are an important part of seed germination for some varieties of red woods. With semi rural developments, there has been a huge decline in naturally occurring wild fires and controlled burns. This article mentions nothing on forestry management.
- 0xffff2 6y agoFTA >Big Basin, in particular, has benefited from the longest, continuous program of prescribed burning anywhere in the state since the purposeful burning done by indigenous people who tended this landscape for thousands of years. That's the main thing that's missing from modern forest management by most accounts. Reading that gave me a hell of a lot more confidence that the trees are probably mostly safe, even if pretty much everything else has been wiped out.
- soledades 6y agoFrom the NYT article referenced: "Still, Ms. Barth said there was reason to be optimistic about the fate of the trees. 'They’re meant to resist and even thrive in response to wildfires,' she said. 'If any place is going to be able to withstand this conflagration it’s Big Basin.'"
- lhorie 6y agoI think it's not just a matter of man-made structures being gone. Look at 0:31 of this video[1], the giant bright ember on the left is the iconic tree[2] by the visitor center. Having seen what burning firewood looks like, I would be extremely surprised if that tree managed to survive that. And judging from the extent of the damage, most of the most memorable trails in that park are probably also completely destroyed. I'm glad I had the chance to visit this park last year, but also sad to see its apocalyptic state on top of everything else that already happened this year. [1] https://www.ktvu.com/news/californias-oldest-state-park-big-basin-suffers-extensive-damage-because-of-wildfire https://www.ktvu.com/news/californias-oldest-state-park-big-... [2] https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/_aLLH1G53QxyzKCleBGwOA/o.jpg https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/_aLLH1G53QxyzKCleBGw...
- ummonk 6y agoMost redwood tree trunk hollows are completely blackened on the inside - I would hope this tree ends up the same.
- thaumaturgy 6y agohttps://twitter.com/ethanbaron https://twitter.com/ethanbaron appears to be in the park right now and is photojournaling some of the destruction. As he says in one of the tweets, "More redwoods near Big Basin park, appear to have made it but as Mercury News environment reporter @PaulRogersSJMN points out, fire prevention for years means lots of fuel that could threaten even fire-resistant redwoods including ancient ones in park interior" [1]. Clearly a number of the larger trees aren't going to survive this [2][3][4][5]. I see statements about "wildfire being a part of the natural cycle" pretty often but it seems to stem from a misunderstanding about the different scales of wildfire. Smaller, cooler, more frequent brush fires were a part of California ecology in some areas; modern wildfires are far hotter and more destructive and are killing vast swaths of forests that have previously survived for hundreds or thousands of years. There's an arboretum just outside Eugene, Oregon that does a nice job of talking about fire's historical role in the local ecology, and the Oregon Garden just outside Silverton also has a section dedicated to walking through different kinds of forest ecologies and explaining which plant species flourish as a result of different management strategies. The unmanaged, fire-suppressed forests are terribly vulnerable to wildfire as well as stress from pests and competition. I also took a few photos just a couple of weeks ago of a once-forested area that had burned over 20 years ago. It's still dead. My first visits to Big Basin were at least 35 years ago and I don't know how to express how saddened I am by this news. [1]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296547748259360768 https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296547748259360768 [2]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296640252279312384/photo/1 https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296640252279312384/ph... [3]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296640967299063809/photo/1 https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296640967299063809/ph... [4]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296641416802656256/photo/1 https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296641416802656256/ph... [5]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296643324275593216/photo/1 https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296643324275593216/ph...
- BurningFrog 6y agoYeah, maybe the main evolutionary advantage Redwoods have is their ability to survive fires. When other trees are burned away is when the Redwoods multiply and take over abandoned land. "One very important adaptation for the coast redwood is its thick bark with deep grooves running vertically along the tree. It is this bark that gives the redwoods their fire-resistant characteristic. Older trees are able to survive fires because their bark is so thick and acts as a fireproof shell." From: http://bioweb.uwlax.edu/bio203/s2009/hemmeric_nata/Adaptations.htm#:~:text=One%20very%20important%20adaptation%20for,acts%20as%20a%20fireproof%20shell http://bioweb.uwlax.edu/bio203/s2009/hemmeric_nata/Adaptatio....
- jarnagin 6y agoWhile fire is a natural part of the lifecycle of these forests, it’s important to note that the specific forest management practices that have been implemented over the last century have drastically changed the character of the fire regime in western forests. Most of our pine species have evolved to burn every few decades. During these burns, a fire sweeps through the forest floor, killing most of the trees which have cropped up since the previous fire but haven’t had time to mature. The older, taller trees survive because their characteristic thick, flaky bark protects their trunks from the heat of the burn (interestingly, the smoke from the burn causes the cones in the taller trees to open up and fall into the freshly carbonized soil, creating the next batch of seedlings). The younger trees don’t have this yet, and anyway they usually aren’t tall enough to keep their branches out of the fire, which leads to the major issue here. Fire prevention over the last hundred years has resulted in forests with a wide mix of trees at various canopy heights, which fire ecologists have taken to calling ladder fuels, because the trees are taller than the saplings which would usually be cleared out and shorter than old growth trees, providing a “ladder” for fire to jump into the canopies of older forests. These forests are not in any way whatsoever equipped to deal with canopy burns. All of their fire defenses are near the ground, in the bark, and there’s a high likelihood that once the fire reaches the canopy it will at least kill the tree, if not spread through the canopy and destroy the forest. It goes without saying that the physics involved here, when the fire is burning from the ground up to hundreds of feet in the air and consuming all of the available fuel, are magnitudes different than a typical brush fire on the forest floor. While these fires weren’t impossible in prior to the emergence of forest management practices, those practices have unambiguously resulted in more and more severe fires by increasing the volume and density of fuels in these forests. To that end, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if the fire really has consumed all of Big Basin.