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This is bad and only getting to get much worse. The opening paragraph just grazes the issue but doesn’t bring it up in the rest of the article: > The US Forest
by akiselev 3y ago
This is bad and only getting to get much worse. The opening paragraph just grazes the issue but doesn’t bring it up in the rest of the article:
> The US Forest Service deputy fire chief had been deployed thousands of miles from home to battle an out-of-control blaze in the wooded bogs and swampland of Alberta, Canada.
These bogs and swampland are nothing like California. These are ecosystems so wet and cold most of the year that the detritus doesn’t fully decompose and instead builds up into a layer of peat meters thick that has been growing since the glaciers started receding. Imagine millions of square miles of wetlands and forest sitting on top of the largest contiguous carbon sink on the surface of the planet… and it burns so well humans have used it as a source of cheap and dirty fuel since ancient times.
This is it: this is one of those climate change death spirals. As the summers get hotter and drier, the peats dries out and becomes combustible. When it burns, it further dries out surrounding peat, increasing the amount of fuel available instead of burning it away. It can even burn underground between fire seasons, surviving rainy seasons! There is no stopping it and active control measures like controlled burns will do nothing but make it worse. Fire breaks? Can’t dig deep enough. Suppressant? Won’t penetrate the top layer of peat.
Siberia shares much of the same problems with peatlands and it’s been going rapidly downhill since the massive wildfires started in the early 2000s. Since 2010 [1], things have rapidly accelerated and now giant wildfires rip through Siberia on an annual basis. Canada is starting to enter that same death spiral.
When it comes to climate change I’m more of a techno-optimist than a doomer but this is one of those consequences that we can’t possibly stop, only mitigate. These fires are going to be the new normal for peatland ecosystems the world over. We should all get used to a northern hemisphere wrapped in smoke parts of the year.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires
- rngname22 3y agoHow long would it take for all the peat to burn up and be gone? 1 year (obv no) 5 years 10 years 25 years 50 years 100 years 1000 years ?
- akiselev 3y agoPeat ecosystems are an active area of research and estimates vary but they supposedly store twice as much carbon as all of the world's forests combined. Burning them up on the order of decades or even a century would probably kill all photosynthetic life on earth and anything that depends on it. It would block out the sun with smoke, more than double the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and increase the average global temperature anomaly from 1.5C to 4.5C just from the extra CO2 alone (not including the heat from the global fires). Burning it that fast might even lower the oxygen in the atmosphere enough to make it unlivable for large mammals like humans. Thankfully, that's practically impossible because the fires would be limited by the amount of oxygen available to them. Realistically, it will take thousands of years, if not tens of thousands, to burn it all away.
- supportengineer 3y agoIn the future we may all be firefighters.
- ars 3y ago> As the summers get hotter and drier According to: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=yearly+rainfall+in+alberta https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=yearly+rainfall+in+albe... there has been no change in rainfall or temperature in Alberta over the past 70 years.
- slimginz 3y agoAre we looking at the same data? Cuz I see the temperature going up around 5ish degrees since the 60s and almost no rainfall the last few years according to your link. I’m on mobile so I can’t see exact numbers but it’s definitely noticeable.
- ars 3y agoThe no rainfall is just missing data, not actually no rainfall. Where do you see 5 degrees? Make sure to switch to "All Data", not "Last Week" - there has been zero change to the temperature.
- Arn_Thor 3y agoThat source shows temperature trending up. What’s more, the article discusses the precipitation and temperatures in the summer months. It helps little if the winters have gotten colder and wetter. Frozen undergrowth doesn’t decompose much, and more snow just runs off into the rivers as it melts in spring.
- ars 3y ago> That source shows temperature trending up. No it does not. Change to "All Data", and the temperature line is straight.
- dredmorbius 3y agoNo. The temperature trend shows an upward slope from 1980 to present. Eyeballing it, about 32F to 38F over the period. 30F if you extend back to the beginning of data in 1960.
- sillywalk 3y agoAlso the soot from the fires lands on ice/glaciers, increasing their melting.
- dredmorbius 3y agoThat's partially mitigated in regions which still have ongoing precipitation, so that the soot doesn't remain on top of the snow/ice for years on end. There are, however, "cold deserts" which see very little precipitation, and for which this does occur, notably in Antarctica. What snow is on the ground accumulates slowly over millennia, and there are places where all precipitation has sublimated or blown away, the "cold valleys" of Antarctica, with bare scoured rock. And of course, even with seasonal precip, dust and soot will speed melting of snowcap and glaciers between precipitation events.